Imagine a better country! No, that is not a passive dream-about-it suggestion. It’s an imperative. As in, while we are spending three weeks largely stuck in our homes, here is an opportunity for all of us to imagine a better country. Starting with you, government!
My wife was saying this the other day – imagine if every business, school, government department used these twenty-one days to seriously brainstorm solutions for the country – Eskom, SAA etc… if everyone went ‘Hey let’s do better!’
And then i saw this tweet from Chester Qha on the Twitterer [where all good tweets hang out, and most of the bad ones!]:
We are in #junkstatus
We are in #lockDownSouthAfrica
We have 21 days to sit and discuss ways we can turn this country around.
Less focus on division and nonsense
Can we get a hastag that's constructive
There are so many bright/smart young ppl here…
You are needed…— ChesterQha (@ChesterQha_) March 28, 2020
STAY AT HOME [oh, i see you are!]
If you’re like me, you probably feel deep despair when you see pictures of selfish white people sitting outside their homes having braais on opposing street corners [yes, this was a thing!] or individuals out jogging or cycling [arrest them all!] or the one story i read about a lady who went out with a bag of shopping that was simply a decoy so she could walk her dog. There is a lot of selfishness and stupidity out there and it can really make you question whether or not this thing is working.
But when i go outside, for the most part i hear quiet. i know my neighbours are indoors. i know that my friends and family are indoors. The streets are a whole lot quieter and vehicles are more of an occasional interruption than a constant buzz.
Most people – in the suburbs [townships are a whole different story and we need to remember that their situations are a whole lot more precarious and uncomfortable than ours before we even think about judging] – are actually locked down.
We made it through the water crisis
i have heard a lot of people suggesting that after all of this, everyone will just go back to life as normal. And there is a huge degree of truth in that.
BUT at the same time there are a lot of people who will have learned and adapted and transformed the way they do things!
We saw this in Cape Town’s recent water crisis. Huge water restrictions and rules forced us to live differently and after we made it through and water levels became less dire, many people returned to ‘life as normal’ but a WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE had discovered a new normal, and largely kept with it. Once we learned we could do things differently, we carried on doing them. We chose to be better!
And it will likely be the same with the lockdown. People are discovering new disciplines which will evolve into habits and new ways of connection. Businesses and schools and universities that have been forced to do things virtually will have found new ways to get work done [again, we need to remember the distinction between the wealthy and the poor where some people have it so much easier than others]
The world will never be the same again, because many of us will not let it be. How do we convince as many people as possible during this time of lockdown to gravitate towards more earth and people friendly ways of living? That is the challenge. And each of us needs to be taking that up with our family and our friends and those in our communities.
To The Government
Back to my wife’s comment though. What if government departments during this three weeks of lockdown used some of the time to seriously brainstorm about how they could do things better to both run the country and reduce the gap between the haves and the have nots.
What if by the end of the lockdown, we had public transport figured out? [That one thing, i firmly believe, would revolutionise our country]
What if, at the end of 21 days, we had come up with a comprehensive plan to curb crime and the violence we see around us and to turn prisons into places of rehabilitation and not just punishment?
What if by the end of our stay at home there was a plan in place so that three months from then there would not be a single pit latrine toilet in any one of our schools?
What if the Health department spent this time working out how we get the best medical treatment for everyone who lives in our country?
It would honestly be great if all of the departments used this time to comprehensively dive into their biggest challenges and try to come up with doable solutions. What other “What ifs” could we add to this list?
We have been given a time and an opportunity where the pause button has largely been pushed for us… and it will be the greatest tragedy if we emerge on the other side of this without too much having changed.
So Government we call on you to take this time seriously and use it to come up with some answers beyond just helping us survive the crisis of corona virus. We want to be a country that thrives and anyone who is not involved in immediate disease-related focus should be locked down in brainstorm and conversation and research and invitation to make sure that we come out on the other side with some solutions.
Please make the most of this time that has been given to you.
To Businesses
The same thing applies to you.
If you have a CEO who is earning a thousand times [or sometimes more] the wages of a low-level employee, what if you took this lockdown time to figure out a more ethical and shared way of doing things.
Because it can be done. Take the story of Dan Price who ran a card payments company in Seattle in the USA. He introduced a $70, 000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff and personally took a pay cut of a million dollars.
As he said: “People are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of, so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York with gold chairs.”
South Africa is the country with the greatest inequality in the world. What if, during lockdown time, the haves got a little more creative [and became a little more human] and moved things around so that the new normal we step into is one which benefits all of the people a lot more equally.
What if during this time of corona virus, businesses figured out ways to do their business in a way that wasted less, reduced their carbon footprint and recycled more?
What if during these lockdown times, businesses took some of the time to figure out ways to look after their staff better in terms of transport, medical, maternity and so on?
What if, in the time given to us, businesses figured out ways that they could partner up with schools or hospitals [two crucial areas that are struggling in South Africa] to help them to improve and overcome some of their challenges. Something that Partners for Possibility is doing amazing work in when it comes to education. This stuff is possible and it’s happening and this is a chance for more companies to get involved.
And so on. What can you as a business do to be and do better?
Obviously a number of businesses will continue with work at this time but there will be many who have some time to get the right people connecting and strategising and figuring out some long term solutions so that we can all return to a better world.
What about me?
i imagine there will be a lot of people who emerge on the other side of this having binge-watched 50 series on Netflix, drunk all the wine and eaten all the snacks. But if that is the extent of what you achieve during this time of lockdown you will have missed out.
i wrote a blog piece early on [when we were still social distancing] with five different things you can do during this time to help keep you busy which included keeping connected to the elderly and immuno-compromised through phone calls and messages and engaging in poetry or story or song writing, learning a new skill and trying to do something at home you’ve been putting off for the longest time. Now’s your chance!
But i also shared this piece about disciplines you might want to introduce into your life at this time when things are a little quieter or less frenetic. Such as reading or exercise or prayer or meditation.
As well as two blog pieces with multiple ways you can keep your kids busy creatively during this time.
As bad as corona virus and the lockdown is [and it is bad], be proactive ad intentional and don’t emerge on the other side of this having missed out on the opportunities that presented themelves. Many online courses are being offered for reduced rates or for free. You Tube has a million videos teaching you how to do a practical skill or cook something you haven’t or learn a language you have always been wanting to.
When the new normal arrives – and life will NEVER be quite the same again – do what you can now so that you are a better person because of it. And take people with you. Don’t let your friends or family be the ones who only sit and watch series during this time [series watching is not bad in and of itself but try and find variety!]
This literally is an opportunity for us to change the world. Our world and the world around us. Let us not miss out on that and let’s really make the most of the lockdown. Please SHARE this post so that we can grab the attention of government and big business and our neighbours and be part of creating a better world together!
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Hi,
You have some interesting ideas. Thanks for sharing. So what I think:
If you look at closed cases in worldometer it’s now 18 percent of closed cases whrere people die. Some say it’s old people or unhealthy, but it’s still deaths and its almost 1 in 5! In south Africa it might be worse with the compromised immunity and TB here. So we need to be extremely careful.
It’s a crazy idea to have all the peple collect Sassa and wait in queues exposing themselve and others to virus. Then the must also travel there and back, followed by shops. Virus virus everywhere. One becomes paradoid but rightfully so.
So why not have trucks or army, busses or even taxis help and go direct to townships, carrying food and supplies. Give out basics for free. Then also have people buy anything else from kiosk trucks? Stand apart or allocate certain times maybe by name or whatever system and distribute it. This way much less travelling and contact for the poeple. It would mean maybe 100 people travelling instead of a township of 50000.
The police minister is right in not allowing dog walking. Say one person in the street is sick, or even a passerby coughs on the pavement and the person or dog steps into it, then back home and on the carpet, dog jumps in bed. You see where I am going. Sounds paranoid but we know it’s contageous and lasts on surfaces. So shoes off at the door. Also people might see a neighbor from up the street and then talk. And more virus. Eventually everyone is socializing and talking in person about the situation. And it becomes more lax.
So we must get behind the plan as it’s all over the world and we’ve seen the dangers there.
So let’s be sensible. Get into a routine and buckle up for 3 weeks. If it’s to end of May or june then we must do it. It’s life or death. The virus doesn’t care.
Stay safe and I leave you with this nice message forwarded to me…..
The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks.
I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.
We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.
As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that.
First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do.
You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days.
You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it.
You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy.
You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…
You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest.
Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.
You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again.
You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training.
You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all.
You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules.
You will count all the things you do not need.
The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.
Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant.
Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month?
You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.
You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.
Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.
Many children will be conceived.
Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.
Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.
You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.
You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.
You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.
Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.
At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.
You will eat again.
We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.
If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.
© Francesca Melandri 2020
Thanks Graham, i really love your suggestions in terms of the government distributing food and people not being stuck in lines and transport, makes a lot of sense. At the moment it seems like the townships have largely been kept free and so keeping the Sassa people away from the middle/upper class people as much as possible [so have sent out huge requests asking everyone who doesn’t need to shop to please stay away for the next 3 days in favour of the Sassa people] but ja, what you suggest sounds even better. We have to be doing everything we absolutely can to keep the spread slow cos once it gets going here it could be an explosion…
Thanks for the share – have read that article and it’s really helpful!