Posts

Never say never, after all what do you know?

I often wonder at the absolutes we use to describe our lives, how we perceive and define our realities. ”I will never get a good education. We have no money at home. I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. I’ll never accept that in my life.” These absolutes have a way of forever defining how we think. They define the parameters with which we live our lives. What they also do is to give us a very misguided idea that we are somehow in control of the possibilities that life presents us. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t me to discredit the value of setting goals, having a clear plan to achieve those goals. By all means, plan away, after all dreaming big, wanting more and wanting better for yourself is the gift of intelligence. It’s the human condition. That very condition unfortunately is also the reason we try to define our lives with limitation and absolutes. Okay so what is the point of this? It’s not the self-obsessed need writers have to be looked upon as the great fountains of know...

No one wants to be "That Guy"

Let’s talk about race. Now before you stop reading hear me out. I ask for your patience because frankly, I get it: people are tired of talking about race. In every facet of our lives one time or another we must all be exposed to a race discussion. It is the nature of our "rainbow nation". It is the nature of our modern world. Truth is though; I am not that tired of talking about it. And let’s not forget, we are not talking about 40 odd years of the legalised discrimination of apartheid here. Nor are we talking about 450 years of colonial oppression. I am equally appalled and affected by a racial injustice half way around the world as I am in my own backyard. The race discussion is about the systematic oppression of the black man on a global scale for thousands of years. As far back as 650AD Arabs having been harvesting from the Swahili coast and as recent as 1950 the slave population in Saudi Arabia was approximated at 250 000(1/4 of its population) Even the Jews took ...

Excuse me, its my turn to talk!

I always imagined the blogger as this hunchbacked golem. I imagined him sitting in the dark, ash tray full to capacity; sipping on energy drinks and trolling the net; waiting to spew discourse at a moment’s notice. In my head I dehumanised the blogger. That horrible creature, spreading its tentacles across the web, spawning constantly and disseminating untested information about God knows what with 2billion+ internet users ripe for the picking   So in my space I would go about throwing my two-cents-worth about bloggers, the power they possess potentially. I threw my opinion about what people wrote about, opinion pieces, politics and stories in mainstream media outlets. I talked about what I thought to whoever would listen....okay so I realised I have an opinion about most things. I also realised that I was no better than the monster-blogger I criticized so much. In fact what set us apart was the archaic medium I used to get my opinion heard, word of mouth. The medium that ha...