IF South Africa does not leave you exasperated at least once a month, chances are that you are not paying attention. Lucky you.
If you were paying attention, you would know that there are good reasons to despair once in a while.
Those feelings are not bad things in themselves. The terrible thing is dwelling on them.
It is the feeling of being defeated just because at that moment, the world is too much with us, to use poet William Wordsworth’s verse.
Despair is, however, better than indifference. It is better than the attitude some among us have, best illustrated in the drawing of people in a boat with a hole and those on the one end saying they are pleased that the hole is not on their side of the boat. South Africa is that boat.
That our better education, employment and salary bracket insulates us from the struggles of the majority of our compatriots simply means we are on the one end of a boat that is accumulating water.
Sooner or later, our safe place in the boat will mean nothing when we all sink, despite having once been in the pound seats.
The hole in our boat is inequality, unemployment and poverty.
Virtually every social ill can be traced back to one, some or all of these wrongs. It is made by the fact that there are some who genuinely believe that these three situations are either naturally occurring or a result of one group working harder to avoid this fate and another being slothful.
Nobody in their right senses should condone wanton destruction of property such as we have seen at some of our university campuses.
It must be equally wrong to suggest as some have that young people must just accept, as a fact of life, that some of them will have to drop out or not go to universities because they happen to be born to parents too poor to give them a higher education, when they merit it. To say, as some have, that the students are wasting their time because of the long queue of unemployed graduates also misses the point.
It should be patently obvious that one has a greater chance of landing one of the few available jobs if they have proved themselves to be up to the rigours of achieving higher education than one who has not.
That is not to say that everyone who has a degree is better than one who does not.
But unless the one without it has some other demonstrable advantage over the one with more education, the one with an education will get the nod.
Only those who come from generations where achieving a higher education degree can be indifferent to the psychological triumph, not only themselves but sometimes their family and extended family graduating, of wearing academic regalia.
Our position in the potentially sinking boat should not make us blind to the debilitating effects of poverty and how hunger and feelings of exclusion have a way of bringing out the worst in us.
Take a moment and remember how grumpy you or someone you know gets when hungry.
Now imagine what this hunger (for knowledge, fair opportunity or recognition) must feel like for someone who is systematically denied what they need to satisfy their souls.
We cannot carry on like this. We cannot afford to not care about the noisy voices in the streets just because we are safe and warm in our own houses. It is unsustainable.
It is easy to find those responsible for the hole in our boat. Sometimes we will be correct in identifying who is responsible, sometimes we will miss it. Either way, it will not make the hole go away.
Some of us can opt out of the boat by grabbing the few life jackets and lifebuoys there are, like moving overseas or sending their children to private schools and universities or moving to private estates.
But that is not an option for everyone, even if they would like to. We are stuck in the boat we are in, but that need not be a permanent situation if we think creatively and, as a start, stop thinking that the hole in the boat is someone else’s problem.
I am not asking you to justify or excuse those elements of the student uprising that you do not like. But whatever you think about the inconvenience it causes to your day, spare a moment to think about how we ended up here.
President Jacob Zuma has decided to get tough with the students. In paternalistic fashion, the grown-ups have resorted to scaring the “naughty children” when caring might have yielded better results. What a pity. What a lost opportunity.