trail-blazing

Celebrating activism.

1916 - 2014 -  MaMbeki - A Life of Activism

This topic is inspired by the life of MaMbeki and my re-listening of the Bob Dylan song: Only a Hobo. It is also informed by recent media coverage on Tuberculosis in South Africa.

We work hard at Vega to immerse our students in the different ways of imagining and thinking. We then encourage them to do. To implement.

In a broader sense, we emphasise the importance of considered and relevant activism within a social context.

I believe that if we can think, then there is a collateral responsibility to act. Do we think enough? Act enough?

We have the capabilities and resources to resolve most of our worlds wicked problems and issues. TB in South Africa is an example. The experts say we can get rid of it like we did with polio. But we don't.

Is it because we don't think enough, or if we do, do we lose our resolve when we face down the work needed to fix things? We then then divert our gaze onto - it must be someone else's problem? Or is the issue that we, who can think and consider broader issues, are too satisfied with, and caught up in, ourselves?

Satisfaction, is in my view, the soporific that anesthetises and paralyses action.

It is my experience that chronic dissatisfaction is what leads us to action. Consider the following:

asleep                                                  awake
static                                                   dynamic
answer                                                question
comfort                                               discomfort
satisfied                                              dissatisfied
passive                                                active
dying                                                   living
dead                                                     alive

Activism is about embracing the right column. The upside, is that while this is challenging, it does make us feel more alive.

Activism means we do not accept the so-called current reality because, in human terms, our reality is often too narrow, too exclusive and too selfish.

Increasingly we must break out of these reality bubbles and rather engage from a human-centric position. The driver or fuel to help us achieve this is, I submit, chronic dissatisfaction. While this is not an easy space to live in, it affords us the correct perspective and demands that we ask better questions and to push ourselves to find answers.

In the last poem written by contemporary American poet Raymond Carver, just before he died of cancer, he asked himself whether he got what he wanted from his life. He answered:

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Can any of us be satisfied in our lives while the majority of us do not feel beloved? Or is our immediate response that this is not our problem. It is their problem. I suggest we must re-contextualise and consider this a human issue and therefore we are inextricably part of it.

The reward is that engagement with others, beyond our immediate circle, makes us feel more alive. It has taken me a long time to realise that without this, we have our heads buried in the sand pretending, denying and dying as human beings.

May you escalate your dissatisfaction. As the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas implored us:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage rage against the dying of the light.