Through my daily community observances throughout Cape Town, one thing is for sure; synchronicity is absent. Every wing of the town is moving independently. Yet each wing needs every other to stay sane. We politicise it as racism, classism or any demarcation we can coffer.
Some blame this division on Apartheid(although some find this excuse distasteful), and some fashion more abstract reasons.
There is one certainty, though, if we continue in this manner, we may perish.
Living together will require forever more willpower and commitment. We will grow recluse, and finally, we will lose the grandeur of life and its little things. And it is kind of happening, succinctly! Specific demographics favour certain locations, same for schools, health care and recreational spaces.
What becomes of this are fidgety, hyper-vigilant people who don’t enjoy the city space in its entirety. Always on the lookout for the enemy, and an articulate prayer against them encroaching on ‘our’ areas.
It also evolves into discreet warfare, where groups measure their ‘city rights’ by how far into the peripheries they can force other groups. Spaces are demarcated automatically, and they have a racial silhouette.
The crowd is not always right!
People do not realise how goatish they may be by picking sides in a narrative they did not write. But they’d rebut and adjudicate you for labelling them as such. Usually, the most submissive group members are the loudest in bigotry.
Yet, their behaviours do not coalesce with where the world seems to go, globally!
What results is a city in restraint against where the world is going! A city unwilling to juxtapose cultures and ideas! Cape Town is juxtaposed with the co-existence of wildlife, plantlife, mountains and city-space, but not with culture. Certain cultures don’t yet belong here. And we haven’t begun inventing a unified culture(best solution).
But there may be a solution, and it has much to do with the outliers of all the groups. Outliers are naturally rebellious people and are inquisitive. They are proponents of freedom and enlightened living. Outliers are community members with enough vigour to grin amidst the turmoil.
Possible solutions!
Below are three possible solutions that we may employ to bring more harmony to any city.
- Learning to share duties: This strategy forces people to participate jointly in an event or a task. Most potently, it forces them to anticipate a shared outcome of the task. Learning to share duties may be a misnomer, so I will explain it further. I raise the possibility of sharing as a uniter but fail to explain where and how a task may arise. Essentially, a task may come from any group, i.e. a tender posed that any person, regardless of race, may fulfil. For instance, a gardening services tender that an identified street beggar(of an opposite party) may meet. This is a controversial proposal, hence the need for agents such as outliers.
- Using agents to empower: An agent is any person who acts as a mediator between two people with mutual interest. Considered this way, an agent serves a decisive role in bridging the gap between two polarised people. Better yet, an agent could be anyone. Individuality is what we have foremost as a species, and an agent can tap into that power. But how are agents found, and who qualifies as one, should there be screening involved? -No, this is not an electoral or a job posting. We indeed need the best people for any task, but more often than not, we find that dedication and curiosity outweigh other forms of qualifications. Especially for this kind of job! What we need is software where agents can register themselves and bid for tenders, then procure and micro-manage others. It would be best if you had software like selfli for that. Find us here.
- Using brand-optimised visibility: Ultimately, we all want to be seen and heard—every one of us. And search engine optimisation is the best way in which we will achieve a piece of that vision. It is not a secret that there is a bearish sentiment around consumer confidence; this is true for all economies. So charging people for being vocal about their businesses would be super crude. Every change needs catalysts, regardless of who it is. The trigger here is selfli. At selfli, we are a duty and asset sharing platform aimed at businesses and persons who want a way to access resources. It is agent-driven. And lastly, it supports businesses with free SEO forever. To topple all that, we offer low rated web-pages, just because we can!
Verge tinkers!
We believe that we are tinkering on the verge of a paradigm change and are excited to be partaking in this space.
We, too, are agents of change; by being sharers of software and information. We are the frontrunners of a paradigm shift, a reality that we want to live in, and we are helping to shape it. We are opponents of economic cataclysm.
Communities are built from people who share an endpoint, people whose lives and milestones are shared. Familiarity breeds contempt only when people are willing to sit around the same table. Sharing tasks is akin to volunteering to forego baptism in the faith of living with other humans with a lowered guard. A degree of embrace is a style of leadership that schools never taught us. Therefore it is excruciatingly uncomfortable, but a necessary evil. Life’s true rewards come from showing some vulnerability and absence of control in favour of the might of life. Somehow it seems like the less we try to control, the more we are free!
In the end, I understand the need for socio-cultural preservation, primarily for inheritance purposes. But our children may collapse the very same structures we built for them. Because, in the end, the grips of change are too mighty to oppose. The forces of change were long set in motion before we were even born.
Let’s rejoice that we do not live with government-instituted embargos. With that being said, change is up to us.
