“Don’t be angry Mr Strato”, he said. His face showing the hurt of my stern rebuke.
“Don’t be angry Mr Strato”, he said. His face showing the hurt of my stern rebuke.
In truth, at that moment, I didn’t really care about his feelings or those of the half a dozen young men I’d just screamed at.
Stressed and with limited time, neither change in my pocket nor cash in my life, I wasn’t really ready to be the “father, king, master, boss, bra or friend” that the group of beggar-carwash-carguards were calling me – their outstretched open palms in my face.
Money for bread, food, milk, electricity, sick family members or “just to buy something”.
It exhausts me to hear my name shouted out while being mobbed.
Some sprint for a block to beg from me.
It’s sadly insane.
Their seemingly constant desperation has turned those whom I enjoyed engaging with when I first arrived in G'town, into a gauntlet of “no, not today, next time, I don’t have, I gave you yesterday, here take it and leave me alone”.
Ultimately, with the passage of time, they and I both have become a tad unkind.
They push for every cent and I resent every encounter.
Environmental degradation includes human relations too. And ours have been badly eroded by their misinterpretation of me as a fatcat “have” – I’m just a drummer, not a Rolling Stone – and my growing perception of them as a pastiche of perpetually hand-out seeking “have nots”.
Desperation and polarisation.
Everything I thought we’d begun to overcome in ’94, in some spheres, feels like it’s gotten worse.
Economic disparity and degradation of man-made and natural environments is escalating. From potholes to polluted groundwater and social strain; in my view, an inept, ineffectual, self-promoting, greed-inspired government is now a total non-entity to be completely by-passed while we sort it out ourselves.
How?
Compassion and inclusivity for a start.
Beginning to see each other as people rather than quasi-representative clichés. Engaging on levels more meaningful than hand-outs, stock phrases or rebukes.
Right now it’s too easy for organised crime to take advantage of social alienation and poverty in turning poor men into poachers – or for mining interests to buy community leaders’ support for catastrophic “development” in pristine landscapes.
“People, Planet, Prosperity” was the payoff line of the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg – in 2002!
Twelve years on and nothing’s changed. Yet. But it must. And it can only come from us.
Somehow.
Because before we can stop destroying our planet, we need to stop seeing each other as parodies.
Personally, I want the humanity of my early interactions with Grahamstown’s car-guards back.
The banter, the laughter, the mutual “seeingness” of human beings, gently sharing the same space, with mutual respect and the comfortable understanding that together we can make it mean more.
Extrapolate that worldwide and you have my vision of what banalities like “people, planet, prosperity” actually mean.
Now to act.
Tomorrow’s always a new day.
I hope.
