Straighten your spine
We must get our heads out of the sand before we suffocate in a bubble of our own making, writes Mark Barnes
We must snap out of it! I’m so bored with the whingeing, the blaming, the resignation, the acceptance, the denial. I’m so over it. Sure, we’re f*cked. Even the polite people are saying so. Even the people who can’t bring themselves to say anything beyond “One” this or “One” that, and “One” shouldn’t and “One” would like to see, and I wish “They” … even them (dinner-party, chino-wearing bores that they are) are starting to say “We” and “I”, because the threat is now so real and present and obvious, because we really are f*cked.
Do something about it already! Let’s stop our cars at the side of Oxford Road and buy the last miserable bag of over-ripe naartjies and a couple of loose cigarettes from the desperate vendor sitting on the pavement. She needs the money to eat, to get home, to hope, to come back tomorrow.
Let’s get out of our comfort zones and cross the street to where the real shit is happening. Get involved. We’ll get angry, but that’s okay.
Stop whingeing about the cost of an investment visa in Portugal, or how the flat you bought there is a little small … “but at least we’ll be safe”. You’ll be an outcast, a refugee, you won’t know any doctor’s cellphone number, you won’t know which restaurants serve fresh fish on a Monday, or even who the good and bad people really are, despite appearances (we know here).
You’ll become a smaller person. You’ll spend the rest of your life explaining why you left — because you couldn’t bear what you saw happening, and you did it for the children.
Straighten up your spine, stay, make a difference.
We’re not going to get out of this mess by simply “changing the narrative”, or through “structural reform” (whatever that is), or polite discourse, or webinars, or bulletpoint, diagram-cluttered, wannabe presentations — traipsing out the wellworn, non-specific “should do’s” that have got us nowhere over the past two years of misguided, euphoric expectations. No.
What did we think? Did we expect that the same-old, same-old polite engagements, keeping everybody happy, populist rhetoric would get us through our grave economic and social challenges?
Well, conventional wisdom and “everyone’s views matter” just ain’t gonna cut it anymore. We’re in the midst of a social, economic, human disaster, the likes of which have spurred revolutions in the past. World-record holders in inequality for some time now, we’ve just added worldchampion unemployment to our trophy cabinet. Do we expect to find the answer in a textbook, or a committee room, or a strategy session? We won’t.
For all the personal devastation (both as a health pandemic and an economic shutdown) that the intrusion of Covid-19 has dealt us, it has been a wake-up call in business constructs that we’d never have imposed on ourselves. However few of our businesses will survive (and there’ll be at least one in each sector), those that do will be fit and strong — catalysts for future growth again. One day.
We’d never have tightened, and counted properly, and found the truth and done our own micro-structural reforms if our very business survival wasn’t threatened.
Our survival as an independent country is also at risk. It will be required of us to implement some radical changes. Now.
Stop protecting your turf. Start seeking out the intersections, abandon the futility of separate development (I thought we realised that ages ago). It won’t require unilateral compromise, but it will require multilateral understanding and cultural accommodation. Let’s for once, realistically, with reference only to the facts, define the realm of possibilities that could be our fertile middle ground. Let’s make a deal instead of a dream.
Listen for a change to the urgent cries of the out-of-the-box thinkers. Embrace their ideas and then wash over their suggestions with a tsunami of pragmatism, if you must, but then do what they say. The world will not be changed by the also-saids.
We’re all going to have to put something in the pot. Don’t hide in the corner when your contribution is called for, or get coy when the time comes to break the barriers that divide us. Stand up, bravely and without reserve (and who gives a shit what the neighbours think) and march towards the real new South Africa with the discipline, energy and resolve it’ll take to make it happen. Determined never to waiver, filled with goodwill, holding hands. Nothing less will get us there.
We could stay in our bubbles. Keep our hair tidy, do our nails, and only shop where the prices keep the riff-raff out of the store. Let exclusivity remain our mantra. Soon enough though, we’ll find ourselves alone. Relics of the past, clingers-on to a bygone era. Hoarders of broken crockery, singing forever the chorus of “when we …”.
Choose this if you will, the way of the ostrich. But know that there will be no place for you in the future of our country.