A Ship Called Dignity

I vividly recall the moment things changed for me. It was early 2016, and I was sitting in a conference hall full of stuffy corporate executives and anally retentive business owners listening to Lewis Pugh explain what it takes to swim across the North Pole. I think he is mad. He had three major “take homes” for us, namely that climate change is real thing, be brave and ask for help as people want to help you, and that you should follow your dreams. Now I do not need to be convinced by his histrionics to the veracity of the existence of climate change. Denialists are just dumb. With over seven and a half billion people polluting the atmosphere, throwing away plastic into landfills and not recycling, investing in firms that do not subscribe to best environmental practices, poisoning vital water sources, over fishing and generally not caring about the planet, something has to give. It’s just common sense. We do however differ significantly on the fallout t

I think I am a self-loathing middle aged white male. I was educated a very conservative dual medium primary school in the early to mid 1980s, where the virtues of the apartheid National Party government were extolled at every opportunity, the states brainwashing project in full swing trying desperately to cling on to power as the walls closed in. In 1989 there was a momentous shift in sentiment and political will as the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe meant that the massive international inflows of money towards defending the African continent against the Red Army dried up, and the Apartheid state could no longer be sustained as sanctions quickly took their toll. I was privileged enough to go to a very liberal English speaking co-ed high school, during a time when the entire world was emerging from a dark age of oppression and cold war. We began to openly discuss the virtues and iniquities of socialism, communism, capitalism, colonialism, religion, r

Fight or flight. These two behaviors represent the options humans have to choose from when facing a crisis. The luxury of settling on flight is wholly removed when the crisis involves the protection or interests of others who cannot defend or represent themselves. Human nature is then to stand toe to toe with whatever adversity bears down on us and fight to our very last breath. A lioness never leaves her cubs to the mercy of the hyenas.  SASSA and the South African minister of social development seem to disagree. South Africa is for all intents and purposes a welfare state. There are approximately 5 million taxpayers supporting 16.9 million grant recipients. And many more people who are not grant recipients rely on someone who does qualify for one to survive. Now let me add that without the grant recipient, many people in South Africa would simply not be able to live. They would very literally die. The old, the indigent, the sick and the defenseless would suffer unt

Nothing has disappointed me more about the astonishing ascension to power of Donald Trump than the accompanying white power sentiment that has followed it. Trump has become a rallying call for white middle aged men and women everywhere, and not just those that had a penchant towards conservatism or blatant outright racism in the past. No, Trump seems to have reverberated with the middle of the road middle class and become a poster boy for even the meekest slightly left of centre man in the street to find his or her inner fascist voice. Rewind a year or two, and DT was a bit of a joke. His brash flip flopping political aspirations were akin to references of President Schwarzenegger in movies like Demolition Man, somewhat of a nod to Americas fascination with celebrity but never a serious consideration in the hard knock Washington political scene (frankly he still isn’t). Ratings of his show The Apprentice seemed to fortify the more he played up to the role of the ultimate p

The elders tell a story of a boy who was born not to a king or a noble man, but to a lowly shepherd in the fields. This child was not pretty, and he was not clever. In fact he seemed to perform poorly at almost every task he was given. As time went on and he got older, the teachers began to lose all hope that this boy would learn to even be a man, and so they left him to his own devices. At a very young age he left his schooling, and sat in the field with the other herders, tending the tribal sheep as his father had done before him. Nobody seemed to notice that although he had been forgotten by the elders, he very much had the ear of his peers. He would sit and speak of becoming the most powerful chief in the land, and all the lands beyond. While the adults dismissed his stories as the workings of the active imagination of a child, he easily convinced his fellows in the fields that his ambitions were not only a possibility, but that they were an absolute certainty. And