Choosing painless dreams

I choose to stay out of the Nkandla scandal. It is good for my health, but bad for my black life.

Hospitals are but long walls housing the neglect of medical treatment and care; the despondency of medical talent. Incidental mortuaries.

Schools are vandalised war zones and killing fields. Only the abandoned ones remain peaceful, but ghostly. Universities are institutions of implicit racism sweeping across academia, administration; the factory of in-equitable careerism and output.

Townships, which could have been demolished systematically to build humane communities with close by workplace nodes (to stem the chaos of traffic and racist exclusion), are a point of reference to what lifetime human concentration camp should be.

Mines are the killing plains of those who refuse to extract for continued exploitation.

What of the corporate South Africa, the habitat of the suit-wearing professionals, in the open plans and large corner offices? A band of racially abused but glorified success stories of racist industrial age.

And here we are, frothing in the mouth, stoking our national blood pressure, and inducing depression on ourselves over matters of two-tier convenience - private property built with public funds, and public road built for the pockets of a private (foreign) entity.

Only a gullible sycophant, wading in a sea of state patronage (state tender, deployment job, etc), may afford to remain joyous in this moment.

As for those who care, the ones who must remain positive and optimistic about this nation (the burden which they carry to give hope to 70% of our dejected youth) are feeling low and hurt.

We deserve this, until we chose differently. Let us dream of a positive South Africa. We deserve painless dreams.