An inconvenience to life

Picture this: you’re sipping a cocktail at a restaurant on Camps Bay catching up with a few friends over lunch. It’s a Tuesday and this is the perfect opportunity to give your tired feet a rest from this morning’s shopping. To end this beautiful summer’s day, you have rock climbing lined up for the afternoon.

Source

Now imagine that this life of leisure is yours. Every day, no stress about working in a job you don’t like. You have enough money to live comfortably. You have enough time to live life the way you want to. You have enough energy to explore what you’re passionate about. Just imagine…

Whoever said we have to work anyway? I don’t know how it all started but right now the average person works 5 days a week for 8 hours a day. Let’s quantify that a bit further. The average person works a nine-to-five. When you factor in time for traffic and preparing to get to work, it’s actually about a seven-to-six working day. That’s 11 hours a day!

The reward? 13 hours a day to squeeze in a decent amount of sleep as well as that life you yearn to live. Let’s not forget a whole 2 days of a weekend to recharge your batteries so you can get back to 11 hours on the grind for the next 5 days. It is torture that feels like a prison sentence.

Work is such an inconvenience to life. The sad reality however, is we have to work in order to be able to afford rent in a decent suburb, a roadworthy car and to live the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to. I think we all want to be in a position where our salaries afford us the comfort of being able to have what we want, when we want it. But who said we need to give up the best part of our lives in order to achieve this? Is it just because that’s the way it’s always been done? There’s no other way to do it. Is there really no other way to do it?

Well what if there is? What if there is a person who could do your job for you, yet you get to take home the pay? That way the economy could still run like clockwork but you wouldn’t be busting your chops to make it work. The problem is finding resources who wouldn’t mind working so hard for nothing. I think we might just have those resources within our reach…

The government spends a lot of money on detention and rehabilitation facilities. Prisoners of all sorts of crimes are housed, fed and clothed. Some don’t even see the inside of prison wards because our jails are too full. The detained ones wile away their time doing whatever they can – some read, study or just do absolutely nothing. Essentially we take criminals off the street to make our world a safer place. Then we securely provide these prisoners with the necessities and let them live stress-free. The civilians out on the safer streets though, need to struggle everyday just to make ends meet. It sounds like we’re rewarding thieves and murderers and sentencing the law-abiding citizens to a working life of torture.

Well, what if the corporate world could leverage of the prisoners? Take the prisoners and put them in our jobs? Government already provides for them so corporates wouldn’t incur any additional costs. Transport these “resources” to the office every morning, force them to work for their crimes and send them back to jail in the evenings. At least we’re making up productive time for the good of the country.

Of course, the required skills to perform certain task will be an issue but most job functions don’t involve skills that can’t be easily taught. As it stands, companies put aside budgets to up-skill staff therefore they can easily afford to train prisoners. We are dealing with individuals that don’t care much for following rules but there are many ways to ensure performance – the exact same way prisoners are rewarded or reprimanded in prison. Good behaviour in jail gets time off their sentence just like good work performed leads to a similar time off from their sentences. Bad behaviour in jail yields certain punishments just like non-performance leads to the same prison punishments.

The corporate world will definitely need to tighten their security but that additional expense will come off budgets currently utilised for team buildings and socials that will no longer be necessary.

Companies can still meet their revenue targets without paying for labour so why not distribute the salaries to the good citizens? It can even be a government initiative to reward ordinary people with time and money to enjoy life.

Work will no longer just be an inconvenience to life and a necessary evil required in our capitalist society. It will be a mechanism to sentence prisoners while still adding to companies’ bottom lines which enable them to assist in raising the quality of life for all law abiding citizens. The shopping, Camps Bay lunch and a recreational afternoon on a work day don’t seem too far-fetched of an idea now, does it?

A lesson in politics

“You’re not voting? But you’re so opinionated about everything; why are you not voting? Well you do know that you can never complain about anything ever again, right? This is your chance to complain by voting.”

I tend to not get involved in politics. Mostly because I am highly opinionated and believe that our politicians are a bunch of idiots that don’t actually do much. It’s our constitutional right to choose to exercise a say in the running of the country. Lately my decision to remain neutral has come under scrutiny. Now in order to defend my decision, I had to learn a little bit about politics.

The local government election is where you vote for an individual to run your ward. So every individual (one from each political party) steps up and professes what he or she promises to do if elected. Seems simple enough doesn’t it? Wrong!

Apparently it’s not just about the person with the best promises winning your vote. You gotta also strategically align your vote to your party of preference. Don’t forgot that you need to vote on racial lines so if there’s only one councillor that is the same race as you then you’re sorted and you know who to vote for.

Now there are quite a few parties out there and you may be wondering who to vote for. According to the riveting 3^rd Degree show last night, I’ve discovered the following parties that exist:

ANC:      They come around every election time and build something in the impoverished areas. They do a substandard job and leave them worse off than before after they’ve gotten the much needed votes.

COPE:    This party formed itself two years ago and ever since has been slowly crumbling. Maybe that’s why they haven’t done anything for the community yet.

DA:         In light of the proposed Protection of Personal Information Act, they send out unsolicited SMSes to sway votes. When faced with mass anger about a breach of privacy, the head of the party becomes a nasty menopausal woman. Luckily, there’s Lindiwe Mazibuko, a woman still in her prime without the raging hormones. She’s an excellent speaker that redeems the party.

FF+:       I don’t remember anything about this party so clearly they don’t do much – not even talk when they have the airtime to do so.

IFP:        You only hear about them during election time and they’re in the news linked to outbreaks of violence between their supporters and the supporters of other parties.

I also did a bit of research into the candidates for my suburb, Sandown, which falls under ward 91. Now I don’t believe the candidates do much to sell themselves since I had to go searching for them. I only found one website that would list them – a community website called LookLocal:

• Andrew Stewart is a DA candidate and he says he’s been working with the police to enforce by-laws. His aim: to continue doing just that. I wonder how much the DA pays him to visit the police station once a year, tell a reporter about his avid interest in “by-laws” and then have no ambition in trying to do anything else. I’m pretty certain this is just a well paying job for him. Surely civil servants need to have a calling to selflessly serve the community?
• Hilda Masoma is an ANC candidate and her promise is to create sustainable jobs. Finally, someone who understands Sandown’s problems! Sandown is essentially Sandton Central and there are loads of uncouth people at every robot begging, selling or just intruding in your personal space. We all hate the fact that they are there. It’s unsafe and it’s annoying for us. For the people at the robot, it’s their unfortunate way of life. So big up to Hilda for wanting to create jobs for these people! So let’s see how she aims to do this. Well, Hilda thinks that we should hire people to clean our parks and toilets. :-/ Seriously!? That’s how she intends on solving the problems? Sandton Central has pretty good maintenance so how many jobs will she create to clean the forgotten toilets of ward 91? And who’s going pay them? Hilda? ANC? My income tax?
• Busisiwe Witness Hlongwane is an IFP candidate and her solution is simple: to improve basic human needs in impoverished areas. I like it! I suppose she’s going do this through wishful thinking?

There was also a list of other candidates and no write up on them. Clearly if a reporter found nothing good about them, then they aren’t worth reading up on. Also, surely if you want to win, you’ll market yourself? I don’t know if I can trust any candidate who isn’t interested in the elections they are running for. Will they be interested in doing the job once appointed?

According to my research, there’s three options: vote for Andrew who does something with by-laws, Hilda who believes that toilets are the solution to the high unemployment rate or Busisiwe who wants to dream about a better world. Based, on these options, you die hard fans of exercising your right to vote – pick one for me cos I can’t think of anyone worthy of running the ward.

I suppose I should go eeny, meeny, miny, mo instead of voicing my lack of a suitable candidate by refraining from voting? Because apparently, I don’t have a right to complain if I don’t vote to make a change. What change are these candidates going to bring? What good is my vote?

I pay taxes on everything. I pay tax which is used to fund public service. So the next time you, die hard fans of exercising your right to vote, tell me not to complain about public service delivery, I’d like a refund on my tax please. As a consumer, I reserve the right to complain especially when I don’t complain about paying more tax to subsidise those that aren’t. 

Curing lesbianism

They call it corrective rape; forcing a lesbian to have intercourse with a man to cure her of the homosexuality disease.

South Africa constitutionally protects the human rights of gays and lesbians yet corrective rape and hate crimes against homosexuals occur every day. I guess it’s one thing to make gay and lesbian rights constitutional and another thing entirely to convince our communities that homosexuality isn’t a disease that needs curing.

So just what makes a group of men decide to “cure” a girl? A lot of it may be attributed to social conditioning, I guess. Being gay is still taboo and rare. Our religions say that it isn’t right. We’re brought up to believe that it is normal to only be attracted to the opposite sex. I suppose it’s then natural to think that being gay is wrong. But at which point does a man think that he should take it upon himself to show her what she’s missing out on so that she can turn straight? Does this man even understand that rape is wrong – whether it’s for correctional purposes or not? If we’re going to attribute the corrective rape to good intentions by people who just don’t know any better, then are we also going to assume that it is good intentions that lead these same men to believe that they deserve sex when they want it by raping women…because they just don’t know any better?

It’s normal to fear the unknown but in our society, homophobia has turned into intolerance often resulting in hate crimes. It’s not even about being scared of gay people or trying to turn a gay straight, there’s brutal attacks, sexual assault and ultimately murders all because of different sexual orientation. With reactions like this, do we really blame people for hiding their sexual preference? It’s also our own communities to blame for the teenage suicides linked to unaccepted sexual orientation.

Our communities are so intolerant about sexual preference. The question is: how do we remove this intolerance? We really need to educate our people about homosexuality – the science behind it and real life experiences from gay people; not what religion or society dictates. The more understanding we as a nation become, the easier it will be for people to come out of the closet. The more we talk about it, more gays and lesbians will be open without fear of reprisal. The more “normal” it becomes, the more tolerant we will be of homosexuals. And hopefully, then corrective rape will be laughed at as a thing of a past uncivilised generation.

The problem is: how do we start?