Hot air blows away the warning signs

Parliamentary opening speeches are much like listening to stories about lemmings jumping off cliff, so I thought I’d consult my daughter, who recently turned ten, for her opinion of President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address.

She was excited the whole week leading up to it because her school — St Mary’s Primary, just around the corner from parliament — and her Grade 5 class in particular, was invited to fulfil its civic duty by becoming one of the Junior Civil Guards for the 2009 State of the Nation Address.

She tells me they first had breakfast with the premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille. “We waved our mini South African flags and she waved back at us: ‘Good morning children.’ Then we were taken to a hall where we had breakfast with her and other politicians,” my daughter said.

I asked to hear more and she told me they were taken to do their guard duty. “Did you see President Zuma?” I asked. “Yes!” “What did you think of his speech?” “We watched it on a big screen TV inside. We were mostly bored, and I felt drowsy, more standing and keeping quiet. It was not as exciting as I had hoped.”

“Did you listen to anything President Zuma said?” I asked, a little apprehensive. “Yes! He said teachers should not abuse children or else they are going to be in trouble with the law,” she reported. After a short pause: “Dad?” “Ja!” “What’s moral authority?” “Why?” “Because Aunty said he does not have moral authority to say that.” “Well,” I answered, “it’s when people say things they are not practising. At least you got to meet your president and premier; not many children of your age can say that. I guess if you look at it that way.”

She left me thinking that the African National Congress is very good at saying the right things at opportune moments, and doing wrong ones at a crucial one.

But my beef is with the spirit of our age in general. We’ve run out of ideas and rely on hot air to fill the void. This recession, for instance, should have marked a point where the crisis of our way of life was subjected to honest scrutiny; but I’m afraid the opportunity is lost by the predominant voices who want things to continue in comfortable ways known to them. We measure success with consumerism and owning stuff.

Thomas Carlyle saw it when he observed that we “cannot live without artificial excitements, without sensations agréables.” Hence we have no authority to speak because we have no spiritual base, and are not the change we are talking about, to paraphrase Gandhi. Our words are empty rhetoric without backing substance of real action.

The sad part is that we seem to have run out ideas to counteract our weaknesses and get ourselves out of this mess. The lack of ideas has spread from politics to the economy, and to universities. It is not only political leaders who are bereft of ideas; business leaders are greedy, economists superficial, and academics are equally at a loss.

Yet we are not using warnings, such as the recession, that come our way to change our ways, as an opportunity to develop a life with better values, or at least start meaningful arguments for a new type of politics.