There are days that the internet simply takes my breath away when I realize that we still haven’t come close to comprehending the extent of its impact on our lives. It is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.
In my line of work one gets lots of exposure to South African government officials, academics, and stakeholders; which are typical ruling class individuals. Despite it I am pretty upbeat about politics, in general. Conservative Americans with their insatiable desire for independence from government are giving us a good example to follow. Access to their philosophy with its challenges is possible for South Africans, thanks to the internet and no thanks to the mainstream media. But sadly, conservative America will not continue to exist as we know it and that’s all the more reason to get to know it now before it’s no longer accessible.
I don’t know what the future is going to look like for South Africans. There will be change. With countries like America becoming socialist, they will no longer be able to preserve the world order. As much as that may seem like a good thing for South Africa, there may not be other nations or cultures willing to take up the fight for human rights again like western civilizations did. We know China does not have a good track record with human rights. And as the global economy collapses, my fight for survival is just as intense as the next guy’s. Faced with the prospect of an unnatural death, I don’t believe it is very admirable to surrender my soul to hysteria caused by self – doubt in war time.
Most people don’t know the reason for reaching such a place of seeming defeat. After the apartheid government’s failure with their socialist nationalism, one expects white South Africans would have learned from their mistakes. Yet that is not the case. Friends dismissingly retract from discussions about the dangers of socialism with the denial that they are no more socialist than the average person. Is that really all there is to it? I beg to differ. My friends need to learn to identify socialism in their ideology before they comfortably surrender to false moderation. In the meantime, I’ve learned to recognize a culture that is steeped in socialism and it’s prevalent in my family's, friends' and work colleagues' ideologies.
A few days ago I met a blogger in person after we made contact about 5 years ago. My online friend was just as I expected he would be in real life. Immediately we began discussing South African politics in the pleasant ambiance of a coffee shop. There weren’t many people in my day-to-day life that viewed politics the way I did so after a while, I mentioned that I would have loved to stop time at that moment because I wanted to think of a way to preserve it so that I could remember it forever. I experienced real freedom because there was no need to make a conscious effort to filter my spoken words. We let our words flow freely. And I explained that my blogger friend need not worry about the ANC government’s treatment of non-black human rights activists that stood up to the apartheid government. Almost all of them were socialists and they never understood the nature of the apartheid government’s failure. Their sacrifices are bearing no fruit and life isn’t fair.
