Imagine if we dedicated one month to feeling good and spreading the feeling, Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Durban - A great depression is descending on our land. This week the rand crashed to an all-time low. With it came dim prospects for a revived economy and increasing fears of a possible jobs bloodbath.
There is only so much that we as ordinary people can do. Many of us feel overwhelmed by the economic whirlwinds circulating around the world.
We cannot make China not devalue their currency or ask the international investment community to be nice to us.
What we can do is pretend all is well. Yes, fake it till we make it through this space. To this end, I propose an annual “feel-good month”.
Imagine if we dedicated one month to feeling good and spreading the feeling as we do for creating consciousness of the space of gender during Women’s Month (August), or celebrating the exuberance and potential of youth in June.
What is the worst that could happen if we had such a month? For one thing, we would feel better about ourselves while we live out the worst time of our lives.
This does not mean not recognising what is going on. It is adopting an attitude that we are better than what is going on around us, and that, in time, we will weather the storm.
To put it differently, I am suggesting a societal placebo effect.
The placebo effect is a well-known phenomenon in which patients’ illness is alleviated by their taking what they believe is medicine, but which in reality has no medicinal properties.
It is the patient’s faith in what they are ingesting that heals them, rather than the ingredients in what they thought was medication.
South Africa needs this kind of healing.
There is far too much negativity in South Africa. We in the media are probably the prime perpetrators of this negativity.
We undermine the place of collective psyche, good or bad, in society.
Children who grow up in communities in which it is important to be a tough guy who can handle himself in a street fight, naturally grow up believing that is a skill they require to be successful in life.
Those who grow up around entrepreneurship assume creating your own business is the way to go.
When everyone in a society expects the worst, or the best, of its people, this usually leads to self-fulfilling prophecies.
There is always a possibility that calling for this will make some believe that one is calling for sunshine journalism, or to let those in charge off the hook for how they have managed the economy and the affairs of the state.
The opposite of yellow journalism is bad journalism. I assume discerning consumers of news are able to tell the difference between good and bad journalism, and they will comment with their cash.
My sense is that they are already making their feelings known.
Those of us in the news business hear it all the time as our potential readers, listeners or viewers tell us they no longer consume our products because “all we hear, see and read is bad news”.
The “feeling good” month would act as the antidote to how desensitised some of us we have been to all that troubles our souls everyday.
One way of reporting on malfeasance and antisocial behaviour would be to report these from the point of view of the heroes and the good guys, and record their successes.
South Africa is dotted with men and women doing great work for the benefit of others. There are many great teachers who go beyond the call of duty, as there are health professionals who treat patients as though they were their own family members.
We are, however, far more likely to hear about those who did not do their work than of those selfless men and women.
The usual refrain from the cynical is that it is no big deal when people do what they are supposed, and are paid, to do. That might be so, but everybody benefits from positive reinforcement, and others can be inspired by the example. To many of us, stories of children as victims of unspeakable violence; of crime on the streets and in the home; of government officials or public representatives treating the public purse as their own piggy bank, are so common that they hardly raise eyebrows anymore.
Some people seem get their only dose of fun each day from finding and highlighting fault in others. If they cannot find it, they manufacture it.
Internet trolls are a classic example. You would swear that many of those who inhabit this space have no other joy in their life, and that without the comment section where they unleash their hate, their lives would be meaningless.
It might also be necessary that our main national sports not be played in the feel-good month. Many South Africans live vicariously through their sporting heroes. We take their victories as our own, and their defeats just as personally.
A national mood can go from sombre to celebratory in hour and a half, and a person can move between hero and villain with one kick of the ball.
We must work as hard at creating the mood and the impression that we are a “can do” nation, as we spend energy telling anyone who will listen that we are a good-for-nothing people.
* Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is the editor of The Mercury. Follow him on Twitter @fikelelom
The Mercury