Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: September 03, 2018 06:11PM
There is a common South African saying/admonishment: "Get Wise!!!"
It is meant to provoke those who are naïve or reluctant into facing the realities of South African life as they exist, because if those people don't face those realities (whatever, exactly, those particular realities may consist of), the person so admonished can be in genuine, and sometimes lethal, danger.
If I mentally move my consciousness through time, into our common future of, say, the year 2078, I think that Americans of that period will look back upon these years we are living through now as our, American, era of "Getting Wise."
I think they will see this period of history--which is, to us, "now"--as the time when we were provoked to confront the existing, dangerous, and potentially lethal realities which had been, mostly unknown to us, simmering just underneath most people's level of awareness--and I think the academic and popular studies of that future era will be largely about how we learned, analyzed, corrected, repaired, and strengthened the weak spots that most of us didn't even know existed until sometime after [estimate] 2010.
I deeply believe in this country, and in what this newly-born country took on as its then unprecedented national mission 250 years ago, and I deeply believe in the people that Americans, because of our national mythos, believe themselves, and their country, to be.
I think we are going to make it through.
[When I was almost murdered by a random mob after I accidentally found myself trapped by traffic in a township outside of Pretoria, that experience changed my life forever--and in countless different ways. I observed (actually: I observed quite dispassionately, because I was SO unable to do a single thing to save my own life at that moment) the power that one single person (the sangoma who made the conscious decision to save my life) could have to instantly sway a restless, and quickly becoming murderous, mob from following their angry collective emotions. Today, in my own mind because I lived this, I see each American as, potentially, that sangoma--only multiplied by 326 million (the population of the USA was 325.7 million in 2017). We are, each of us, potentially that individual man who saved my life--and I think and feel we are going to come through.]
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2018 06:19PM by Tevai.