Opinion: Global Bystanders Giving Succour To Fellow Leaders

The Paradox of Purpose

What I want to write about and what I eventually get to write are usually different things, but I end up writing, and that is what matters. Sometimes, the thought processes involved in what might have ended up in the original material are not developed enough to constitute a coherent argument, and hence a quandary.

On some other topics, I resist the inclination to offer an opinion, not because the broadest spectrum of viewpoints has been exhausted, but because I cannot be bothered to join the fray as part of the baying and noisy crowd.

Then, I am gratified by the fact that my blog is my private playground, my personal journal, and, though it is open for interaction, conversation, and commentary with others, I exclusively curate the content and advise others to pen rejoinders in their own spaces if they cannot countenance my perspective for any reason.

When Rules Become Weapons

One thought has been percolating in my mind for days: the idea that the head of a school had put out a rule stating that anything that happens on the school grounds is part of schoolwork. Then someone decides to throw stones to break the glass windows, and that appears to pass for schoolwork, when it is entirely wrong.

Next, someone takes away someone else's lunch. The wronged cannot complain because it happened on the school grounds, and it would be passed off as schoolwork, despite the obvious injustice. Unruliness runs riot in the school community, with the authorities appearing to sanction and approve the abuse without consequence.

The Rise of Impunity

A kind of lasciviousness gains hold: an untrammelled exploitation of the weak and a perversion of order. Herein lies the inexorable rise of the playground bully, barely held to account and never held accountable, believing they have a licence to act with impunity, having gained immunity by the original pronouncement of schoolwork.

He takes another small boy in a stranglehold, stripping the child of any autonomy to the point of suffocation. Everyone on the playground cannot boldly come out to say the playground bully is wrong, out of fear of being on the receiving end of the bully's antics. Where they should have ganged up to teach the bully a lesson, the bully gains ascendancy, urged on by lethargic, cowering solipsism and doublespeak.

A Metaphor Unfolding

Behold, amongst you a metaphor of the state of the world today, and it will get worse until someone, and many, decide enough is enough. This bully has no lowest level; each time we have thought it could get no worse, he has plumbed new depths. In the traversal of the bottomless, something must catch that fall, or it will never end.

Think about it, can anyone call him to order?

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A whoosh moment

Coffee Gets Milky

The wind lifts the leaves and sends them dancing. What a thing it is to feel that sea breeze against your face, salt-sharp and bracing. This is Cape Town in all its contradictions: the water we adore from a distance, too dreadfully cold to ever step into, lapping at shores of the beach we walk but never wade.

Morning breaks, and somewhere in a sanctuary, someone reaches for their second cup before the first is fully drowned. Here, beneath vaulted ceilings that will echo with songs, the beans speak their own benediction, at hands one mirroring another.

The milk froths to an airy resurrection, poured into waiting darkness until the black turns cloudy with grace. It's communion of a different sort, but no less sacred for its secularity.

Notes Get Windy

In the dreaming hours, when consciousness drifts between waking and sleep, a figure moves through half-lit streets. From her handbag tumbles a scatter of notes, and in that suspended moment before she reaches down, the wind stirs with intention. You call out, to warn of the loss she's about to suffer, as dream-logic speaks in your voice.

Then the child appears, whimsical and wild as wind itself. From his lips comes a sound, a playful whoosh that blurs the line between breath and breeze. The notes lift, caught between gravity and air, between currency and sound, everything suddenly, impossibly airborne.

It's the kind of moment that clings to you after waking, vivid and strange, the sort of thing that makes you wonder if wind has always been this mischievous, this alive.