Can it be right that the life of a middle-class teen becomes a disaster without electricity? asks Murray Williams.
Cape Town - In the darkness of the latest rounds of power failures, it’s easy to identify the national mood: powerlessness. Powerless to fix – as a nation, until new power sources are constructed. Powerless to blame – because who really knows whose “fault” this disaster is?
Powerless even in our outrage – because it will achieve zero, no matter who we are. We understand our nation needs this, right now, like a hole in the head. That it comes at the worst possible time – when the need to grow our economy, the need to create jobs, is most acute, as desperation mounts, as hope fades.
And so we wait. Powerless.
But there’s a great irony here for the middle class: This crisis is equally, actually, a time to reclaim great power.
Electrical power is indeed the lifeblood of much of our economy. But so too has it become the solitary enabler for many people’s private lives.
The owner of a small business which relies upon refrigeration can be empathised with, in his bleakness.
But the suburban family at the weekend, feeling power failures as crises? Not so sure.
Can it be right that the life of a middle-class teen becomes a disaster without electricity? Without power for his smartphone, tablet, laptop, Xbox, PlayStation 4, 3D Blu-Ray player and 51-inch Smart TV?
That without these firmly clutched in fist and mind, the world suddenly seems empty of meaning?
And increasing droves of adults too. Who have little to say or do around the dinner table without updating their Facebook status or scanning Twitter for titbits. As if the delicious titbits on their plates – which so many are denied – were no longer sufficient.
The profound irony, of course, is that as holidays near, many still romanticise the notion of being “technology-free” – that caricatured lazy afternoon in the hammock, snoozing, book in hand.
The candle-lit dinner, dancing shadows on delighted faces. Stories around the campfire.
Well, now’s that chance. To turn powerlessness into power. Into gratitude.Not just during load shedding, but every day.
As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
“I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life…”
What flickers on the face of “that hopeless little screen”, in the words of Leonard Cohen, is certainly “not life”.
Power to the people.
With thanks to you, Eskom.
