Piles of blunders for us social misfits

Hemorrhoids are something you don’t talk about.

I learned that bit of very important, socially unacceptable behaviour, at the tender age of five, when I asked Uncle Elmo why he was walking so funny.

Mom smacked me so hard between my shoulder blades that ‘Elmo’ came out my mouth as ‘Elpoesss’, together with some saliva and, without the slightest bit of remorse in her voice, she told me to go play outside.

Later that Sunday afternoon, after everybody had gone, mom came to me where I was still sitting in the sand pit under the peach tree, with mud smeared across my teary face, and explained to me that Uncle Elmo ‘waggles like Donald Duck because his poop hole is broken’.

She apologised for smacking me but said it was necessary, and made me promise to ‘never tell anyone that Uncle Elmo has a broken poop hole’.

Buggered poop holes, however, is not exactly what I want to talk about in this column.

I want to point out some of the acute cases of hemorrhoids which society has developed over the last several years; issues which, if pointed out like a naïve five-yearold, will land you a slap between the shoulder blades and you will be sent outside to go play alone in the sand pit under the social outcast tree.

Here goes: You are not to point out that some guy is overweight, even if they are so fat that should they trip over the jumping castle’s cord at a children’s party, the outcome will be multiple fatalities. Instead, you shall pretend that you don’t mind in the slightest having half of them on your lap when flying with Mango from Durban to Jo’burg.

You shall also not comment on the number of children someone has! I know of a single woman who has five children with five different fathers (her mother looks after three of them), and every time she announces she’s pregnant, again, everybody pretends to be very happy for her and organises a stork party. What they should’ve done is given her the number for the feral cat project instead, back when she got pregnant with the first one.

Anything to do with religion is also treated like a case of the piles. Here I dare not even give you an example because all that happens at church, under a tree or in a tent, is the true gospel and thou shalt not question it.

And then there are unintelligent people: Somewhere along the line society decided, seeing that we all have the same size heads, we must all be equally smart. And that if Petrus makes a cock-up of even simple tasks, it is not because he has deficient mental capacity. It’s because he was under-privileged (his single mother had five children), and with a little bit of compassion and patience, he should be allowed to be the board of directors of a trillion rand public enterprise.

But wait; now I’m starting to venture beyond pointing out who walks funny, to shoving a prodder up our snowflake society’s inflamed, pus-filled nether regions.

For that you don’t get a slap between the shoulder blades. You get shot.

So before I make it explode, let me stop here.