Concentrate and focus on the good things in South African history. Democracy, freedom, the Born Frees, “Madiba magic”, reconciliation, the African Renaissance (a term coined by ex-president and poet Thabo Mbeki), and the Rainbow nation.
Let that become the anomaly rather than letting the broken be the anthem for what is wrong in society today. The individual remains answerable to their wakeful conscience of the world around them.
The individual is the wheel. We decide what role negativity (that version of events colours the intellect, our daily lives, the psychological framework of our mind’s eye, and its capacity to think, to curb the inflow/flux of ideas).
So does the issue of the mainstream media out there (social media networks especially). It also plays havoc in our lives. It is poison. The public persona of our leaders in government only serves to demonstrate our thought processes (we put them into power). We haven’t realised yet that the mighty vote is all-powerful. We can tell each other that till the end of time. We can tell each other that until we are all blue in the face.
We can say that we are still tarnished by the past, but no one wants to live in the past anymore (it’s going out of style), certainly not the youth of today but we have all been marked by the past. We have been under the spell of its sinister, suspicious ways. It hasn’t declared all its damages yet.
We are kidnapped by politics. Held hostage, but at the end of the day what remains is this. You direct your life, and it is a choice that ‘you’ must make every day. We want to debate the political, its ‘rehearsal’, its drama but what remains, I repeat, what remains is family, communication (communication, connecting is profound but only once we start to accept each other, listen to each other, respect each other, and forgive), at the end of the day.
The reality is that the fury of the students at the universities must look like a complete nightmare to outsiders. How do we clean that mess up, how we now reconcile the past with the present. We must listen to understand, we must negotiate, tolerate inadequacies (but is the moral high ground, racism, and the discussion of social cohesion an inadequacy), and above all, we must forgive to move forward.
We must always concentrate and focus on the good things in South Africa’s history. It has brought us thus far through centuries of tumultuous despair and hardship.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Renaissance_Monument
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/born-free
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Day_(South_Africa)
https://pmg.org.za/page/central-tenets
