I woke up on Saturday with a few plans in mind, like most people. Around 10:00 the electricity failed, so those plans changed.
I went into town instead, found a shopping mall that had electricity, and ended up watching two movies back to back in the cinemas, and by the time I got back home, lo-and-behold the electricity was back on.
Other people rather rushed online (I can only picture with their laptop's dying reserves and a flaky 3G connection) to vent their rage at all and sundry, trotting out once again more racial abuse than you can shake a stick at.
Over the past 25 years, if I had a dime for every time some angst-filled white person screamed 'This country is in the toilet!' I'd be ... well, in a much happier place than this country where a small vocal minority (I like to think not ALL white people, just the drama-prone ones) can't WAIT for something to go wrong, just so that they can trot out their toilet analogies again.
Honestly, read your comments from the viewpoint of a black person, and ask yourself how credible you look. DO IT. It's pathetic!
Every single time the petrol price goes up, people blame the ANC. Every time the electricity fails, people blame the ANC. Every time there's an earthquake, it's probably the ANC's fault somehow.
I keep walking past white families with three or more children, and yet I keep reading online at people applying 'breeding' to their derogatory statements. If white people have children, do they breed too? I'm just not clear on the racist vocabulary.
As a realist, I expect things to fail. I expect there to be potholes, traffic lights out, businesses closing down and yes - dare I say it? - the occasional power failure.
Yes, by all accounts South Africa's power stations are in a bad way, and yet the same people who're criticising Eskom now are also criticising the ANC for investigating hugely-expensive nuclear power station deals on other threads.
Listen, I live in the SAME South Africa the rest of you do. I also have to swerve to miss the occasional pothole, or have to sometimes fill up a bucket with water if there's an imminent water failure.
If we have a 5% failure rate (as for example the number of 'working' traffic lights you drive past vs the number of 'dead' ones), for the rest of the time things work. The thing that DOES NOT work, however, is this vocal white minority's insistence on taking all the 5%'s and adding them up into a 100% failure all the time of the ANC Government specifically and all black people in general.
As a white person, I'm sick of it. I hope some of you read what you wrote in your moment of anger and feel ashamed. I hope the rest of you just have a failure of your 3G connection - another thing for you to blame the ANC for - long enough to take a nice lie down and sleep it off.
I'm also unhappy with corruption, BEE and the state of politics in South Africa generally. I, however, can tell where 'mindless rage' is necessary, and where it's better to just go for a walk in the sun.