Remember what the way to Hell is paved with

IN TERMS of Public Semiholidays, we must be in the top global league. We’re certainly in an arena where (several categories of) young people know a new reality with such totality that they can’t believe there was ever another reality.

Well, there was. If Tuesday was a holiday, you worked on Monday. If Thursday was a holiday, you worked on Friday. Unimaginable, hey?

You may say: “Great. We’ve moved on.” Yep, this is the way to go, more leisure, less freneticism.

But that assumes reasonable wealth and comfort. Not that half your country is underemployed, underserviced, under a shadow.

The simplest economic fact in existence is that an economy is created by the average person working a little more than 200 days a year. So each day that is casually taken off reduces the economy by nearly 0.5%.

Which at an average five Semiholidays a year is the difference between riots and strikes and caterwaulings and screeching made-up blame-games, and growing employment.

(Research Credit: The Stoep Talk Corporation’s division of Deep Economic Inquiry.)

The Stoep being insufficiently educated to track down Twitter items once seen and now gone, here is a remembered version of an exchange on Monday.

Tweet 1: “Ugly scenes: 50 000 people chase 10 Kenyan men through London.” At which you might think this is the worst yet. Or you might sniff the whiff of a marathon, and indeed see the visuals showing it, so that (1) your jaw drops, and (2) you laugh.

Tweet 2: “What a racist tweet. You shouldn’t say things like that.”

Tweet 3: “What does this have to do with racism? If Australians were known for their running, you could say it of them.”

Tweet 4: “Of course it’s racist, the Kenyans only had to run for two hours, our guys for four.”

Tweet 5: “If we Kenyans were allowed to run for four hours we’d circuit through Nairobi.”

Tweet 6: “They probably would, too,” under a superfit runner in Kenya colours apparently taking a light morning stroll through prostrate pale persons collapsed on the ground in running gear.

Tweet 7: “How did we ever get colonised? LOL.”

Which I pass on to you, because you might chuckle and because you might find relief in seeing race handled with light wit instead of heavy anguish. Mature, you might say.

No point missing a good grumble, while we touch on the geriatric gripe about changing times.

You know how we used to buy a house and a car for 50 cents, and a lawnmower with the change. That’s been much told. Doubt you knew it was real and common for the new chief exec to thank his predecessor and preserve his practices, veering a bit this way and a bit that way in a spirit of continuity.

Nowadays the first thing the new boss says is what a terrible mess he has inherited. He says that even if he was the last boss’s loyal deputy for 15 years. Donald Trump hit a new low, saying that the people surrounding him at his inauguration had wrecked America, which he now single-handedly had to fix.

Joburg’s new regime has been singing this song loud and strong, wiping out fine ideas like the still-new human parking-meters and the nicely challenging “World-class African City”.

Now we have the new Minister of Police announcing that he will transform them into effectiveness and responsibility.

Great intention, if only it didn’t imply that 200 000 of them were depending wholly on him, plus that all his revolving-door predecessors were playing marbles.

I wonder what the next minister will say when the door revolves again.