We South Africans love getting out knickers in a knot over just about anything. As if we don't have enough kak to worry about (the big issues, I mean) we will find minuscule, banal things to further add to our 'bitching lists'. Enter the cellphone. Most of us can't seem to get through a minute without clutching, holding, caressing, fidgeting and pawing these devices. These gadgets of mass consumption themselves consume and enthrall their users, arresting them into a technological trance (My preciousssssssss...). Unchecked, mobiles can easily trapped one into a mental paralysis, where use of the human brain - even with it's evolutionary, innate flaws - becomes secondary and little more than an irritation due to its mortal limitations. I take no high road here. I too have been known to attack my being in frantic search of my cellphone; not only in times of neurotic forgetfulness where split second realisations of "Oh my God, where's my phone!" attack me. As a person plagued by perpetual boredom, my mobiles have served as sources of respite. The games, Tweeting, Facebooking, random Google searching, Wikipedia-ing - all successfully manage to stave off flashes of boredom which normally punctuate my days.
So, with mobiles forming a veritable backbone to most of our days, imagine the horror of not possessing one, losing one, having to go for periods without one or (Cue dramatic music: Dum, dum, dummmm...) being dispossessed of one.
The Gestapo that is Cape Town municipal/traffic law enforcement will now be confiscating cellphones from motorists caught using them while driving. They will proceed to slap the guilty parties with a R500 fine. If you even think of resisting - sorry for you - you'll land up behind bars. It's understandable why authorities are resorting to this. Most South Africans can't even think while behind the wheel, and then they still want to try and make a phone call or SMS, all the while eating, smoking, doing your make up and a crossword puzzle. "Enough is enough" the hallowed peace officers of the Mother City have decreed.
And what do many of us think about this? The move is met with outrage by most, I gather from the coverage given to this matter. Like true South Africans we see this as an attack on our rights, and infringement (stemming from an infringement) "They're just going to far," many will groan. We'll mutter irritable curses, throw our hands up, whine, whinge, bitch and moan. That's the SA way.
I too rolled my eyes at this latest move by Cape Town authorities, not because I oppose it. I myself have transgressed and have been known to have liberally lengthy conversations, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding my phone. I flick my eyes upwards in response to the knee-jerk moaning ignited by this latest 'weapon' in the growing arsenal of traffic law enforcement. Resistance is futile and will, anyway, get you arrested. Instead we should try to resist answering and making calls while driving. It's so simple it's sad. Many seem to shudedre at the mere thought of having to not even so much as glance at their mobiles while commandeering a vehicle. It's become so ingrained, so stitched into our modern lives. Like a phantom limb most of us would wake up in a muddled frenzy searching for our lost appendage the cellphone.
I recently had to go without a mobile while abroad. At first the thought of not being able to stay in regular contact with family and friends left me somewhat anxious. At times the niggling and the gnawing of this loss felt like the irritation a smoker feels when running out of those phallic harbingers of cancer. Was I really bereft without mass communication? No! The loss thereof actually soothed the irritation brought on by modern life, it's insistence on constant connectivity, the misguided belief we need stay in touch all the time, everyday, day and night, no matter what, no excuses. As the days progressed, I soon learnt to make do without my techno-accessory. In fact, the absence of the apparatus brought a bliss of sorts. No more could telemarketers foist their futility on me. Banks couldn't track or hunt me down and bully me and employers were without their key machine of torture and so couldn't harass or force into guilt. My nights and weekends again became holy territories, devoid of the ringing and bleeping and buzzing and vibrating. I was almost totally free of the chains of constant connection (I still had a laptop) and was reminded of a pact I made with myself years ago: Once I'm done with my working life, when I can retire away from the madness and the folly, when I can rest my weary boans and substnace-addled mind, I will gather up every mobile device I've ever had to own. I will then proceed to the nearest body of water and sho -put them as far as my aging arms will allow, much like Nelson Mandela and his appeal to the warring masses of our country, "...take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea."
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
Enough already!
On the 11th of July some of us may be bored enough to know it's World Population Day (yet another pointless day of remembering, honouring and thinking about something. You choose, if you care enough). I opt to deviate from my habitual ambivalence and will actually develop a morsel of interest in this particular day. Why? I'm glad you did(n't) ask.
Driving to work, amid the mess of traffic on a daily basis it has been frequently occurring to me of late: It doesn't matter whether you driving on the heaving asphalt that is the M1 in Johannesburg or a tumbleweed-strewn piece of tar like Poeg-en-poel Rd in Vokallfontein; there are just too many people abound these days, clogging up our lives in so many ways.
In SA we are looking at over 50-million of us, in the world there are now over 7-billion homo-sapiens scouring one of the smallest planets in the galaxy for anything and everything. Food, jobs, potential mating partners, people to talk to, people to kill, maim, bore or please, or just simply a bit of space to call their own. Many simply search for other peoples' spaces and the belongings thereon, to steal or, shall we euphemise, 'surreptiously claim' as their own. Too many of use means too many problems.
Borderline agoraphobes like me don't need a lot of space. I can do with a few square meters of anything really (to be picky in my desperate case would be absurd). I only need a corner or a square or a circle of this floundering earth to call my own, I will occupy it happily... in the absence of others around me. Dream on. The hordes of conglomerated bodies heaped up on each other in tin coffins-cum-homes in places like Diepsloot or Khayelitsha often can't choose their habitat. I can live happily by myself amid 50-million other people, many of them, in my useless opinion, equally as moronic and futile in function as I. But only if it's just that - amid - not necessarily always 'among' others. I encounter stupidity on a daily basis. Firstly, when I wake up and look in the mirror. Secondly, when I have to extract myself from my little piece of lonely heaven/hell to face the outside. I am forced - not by myself, but by necessity and circumstance - to squeeze into daily life, to find my niche in a neck of some other twat. Along with my car, in the maw that is traffic I must endure the idiocy that is a typical South African driver. I observe my fellow-humans, themselves visibly caught in the mechanical, exponential growth of society and humankind. In taxis, they are sardines, breathing, coughing and talking on each other. In the streets, pedestrians in their droves navigate through the desultory queues of non-drivers and not just on the sidewalks. They spill over into the road, partly because of a lack of space on the aforementioned pavement. The space on pavements, like the streets and roads, never enough for the ever-growing foot traffic of people, clamouring over each onward towards... well, who cares.
People, people, people, everywhere, every time, all the time. And the space? It can't grow, unless we cast our eyes skywards. Yes. That's our future - the sky - which does have a limit (as many of us are mundanely reminded by the more cheerful and optimistic among us). Unless we look to space, the Moon, maybe even Mars, where we can continue to breed, consume and behave as humans are expected to - greedily.
Those of use fortunate enough to have employment can 'escape'... not each other, unfortunately. We can take sojourns to other parts of the diminishing space we call earth for holidays where, once we arrive... we will encounter tens of thousands of other other people also vacationing away from their realities.
Speaking of jobs, maybe you have one or two to offer to the hordes of less fortunate, the 'currently and possibly forever disadvantaged', lugubriously standing sentinel at traffic light intersections, 'guarding' our vehicles, mashed into shebeens drowning their sorrows, queuing outside social welfare offices - many of them clutching little humans or bearing the signs of future denizens of the world in their bellies.
It's an unstoppable train, this population of the globe. We, every single last one of us, will be reminded until we shuffle off this mortal coil (to make way for another thousand newborns) to 'change our ways' or we will have to endure equally brain dead cliches, 'make the world a better place for all'. I get it, okay! The growing millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions and so forth pushing and shoving their way into the world since the nucleus of time have been screwing it all up for too long. But maybe, there are those among us (and I know there are many, many, many of them) who should be thinking (or trying to learn to think) twice, thrice and then a few more times thereafter, before procreating and adding to the 7-billion. I single out no nationality, no race, no culture. I address every-single-person (sad enough to be reading this) to stop with the baby-making, for just a bit, and create some space to breathe, live, to find some common sense and sustain what little of this beleaguered planet (and our sanity) that is left.
Driving to work, amid the mess of traffic on a daily basis it has been frequently occurring to me of late: It doesn't matter whether you driving on the heaving asphalt that is the M1 in Johannesburg or a tumbleweed-strewn piece of tar like Poeg-en-poel Rd in Vokallfontein; there are just too many people abound these days, clogging up our lives in so many ways.
In SA we are looking at over 50-million of us, in the world there are now over 7-billion homo-sapiens scouring one of the smallest planets in the galaxy for anything and everything. Food, jobs, potential mating partners, people to talk to, people to kill, maim, bore or please, or just simply a bit of space to call their own. Many simply search for other peoples' spaces and the belongings thereon, to steal or, shall we euphemise, 'surreptiously claim' as their own. Too many of use means too many problems.
Borderline agoraphobes like me don't need a lot of space. I can do with a few square meters of anything really (to be picky in my desperate case would be absurd). I only need a corner or a square or a circle of this floundering earth to call my own, I will occupy it happily... in the absence of others around me. Dream on. The hordes of conglomerated bodies heaped up on each other in tin coffins-cum-homes in places like Diepsloot or Khayelitsha often can't choose their habitat. I can live happily by myself amid 50-million other people, many of them, in my useless opinion, equally as moronic and futile in function as I. But only if it's just that - amid - not necessarily always 'among' others. I encounter stupidity on a daily basis. Firstly, when I wake up and look in the mirror. Secondly, when I have to extract myself from my little piece of lonely heaven/hell to face the outside. I am forced - not by myself, but by necessity and circumstance - to squeeze into daily life, to find my niche in a neck of some other twat. Along with my car, in the maw that is traffic I must endure the idiocy that is a typical South African driver. I observe my fellow-humans, themselves visibly caught in the mechanical, exponential growth of society and humankind. In taxis, they are sardines, breathing, coughing and talking on each other. In the streets, pedestrians in their droves navigate through the desultory queues of non-drivers and not just on the sidewalks. They spill over into the road, partly because of a lack of space on the aforementioned pavement. The space on pavements, like the streets and roads, never enough for the ever-growing foot traffic of people, clamouring over each onward towards... well, who cares.
People, people, people, everywhere, every time, all the time. And the space? It can't grow, unless we cast our eyes skywards. Yes. That's our future - the sky - which does have a limit (as many of us are mundanely reminded by the more cheerful and optimistic among us). Unless we look to space, the Moon, maybe even Mars, where we can continue to breed, consume and behave as humans are expected to - greedily.
Those of use fortunate enough to have employment can 'escape'... not each other, unfortunately. We can take sojourns to other parts of the diminishing space we call earth for holidays where, once we arrive... we will encounter tens of thousands of other other people also vacationing away from their realities.
Speaking of jobs, maybe you have one or two to offer to the hordes of less fortunate, the 'currently and possibly forever disadvantaged', lugubriously standing sentinel at traffic light intersections, 'guarding' our vehicles, mashed into shebeens drowning their sorrows, queuing outside social welfare offices - many of them clutching little humans or bearing the signs of future denizens of the world in their bellies.
It's an unstoppable train, this population of the globe. We, every single last one of us, will be reminded until we shuffle off this mortal coil (to make way for another thousand newborns) to 'change our ways' or we will have to endure equally brain dead cliches, 'make the world a better place for all'. I get it, okay! The growing millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions and so forth pushing and shoving their way into the world since the nucleus of time have been screwing it all up for too long. But maybe, there are those among us (and I know there are many, many, many of them) who should be thinking (or trying to learn to think) twice, thrice and then a few more times thereafter, before procreating and adding to the 7-billion. I single out no nationality, no race, no culture. I address every-single-person (sad enough to be reading this) to stop with the baby-making, for just a bit, and create some space to breathe, live, to find some common sense and sustain what little of this beleaguered planet (and our sanity) that is left.
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