A couple of weeks back, after the Willemse-Mallett-Botha loose maul on SuperSport, Jonathan Jansen penned an article about how 50 seconds of live television could be seen as a “teachable moment” (“A teachable moment for SA”, May 24).
The doorway to this learning was through a key question: how was it possible that people sitting in front of their television screens could see two very different realities?
How is it possible that people view the same event differently?
On the one side was the accusation of flashing the race card to save an ill-prepared butt, combined with a call to wait until all the facts were clear.
On the other was the “#IamAshwin, this man’s story is my story, let’s hear and honour his lived experience”.
Combined, in turn, with “Hey these blooming (or expletive of choice) racists will never change”.
Not only do we see the same event differently, but within minutes two very different sides emerge from out of the chatter. But this isn’t just a South African trait. We may own the rights to boerewors and bunny chows, but a black and white view of the world hasn’t got “proudly South African” exclusively stamped on it!
All it takes is a week across the planet to demonstrate this fact. Take the colour orange. Two weeks back, a boy walked into Sante Fe High School in the US, and killed 10 of his schoolmates and wounded 13 others.
On Tuesday May 29, the school resumed classes.
Two days later, it happened to be National Gun Violence Awareness Day and the #WearOrange movement campaigned for everyone to wear orange in support of gun control.
In 2013, Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old Chicago resident, was shot and killed by a gang member while taking shelter from the rain in a park. Her classmates wore orange in commemoration.
On the same day the National Rifle Association (NRA) ran a media campaign with the slogan “orange has always been ours” – making the point that hunters in the US have been wearing blaze orange safety vests for years.
How, with the Sante Fe shooting still fresh in everyone’s minds, could one colour generate two very divergent views?
On Friday June 1, 21-year old volunteer nurse Razan al-Najar was fatally shot in the chest at the Gaza-Israel fence as she (with arms raised and clearly identified as medical personnel) went to assist someone injured in the now-standard Friday “great march of return” protests.
Of the 3 000 protesters demonstrating at five different locations on the day, 100 demonstrators were injured, 40 of those from live fire.
Al-Najar was wearing the standard white medical coat.
Why does an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) sniper see white as a threat when the world sees it as medical garb?
Could it be that a few days before, the Hamas-initiated attack of a hundred mortars and rockets gave him a different lens from which to view humans on the other side of the fence?
In Nicaragua, multi-coloured metallic “trees of life” (arboles de la vida) are being felled by citizens in a six-week-long series of protests that has already claimed the lives of more than 100 people.
The (supposed) works of art, designed by Rosario Murille, the country’s vice-president and wife of “El Comadante”, President Daniel Ortega, have been erected all over the country.
Meant as art, they are now viewed as symbols of how out of touch the Nicaraguan government is with its people.
Take each of those coloured symbols and consider how people across the world within their own communities got to a place where they view the same thing from very different perspectives.
In 1979, Ortega, Sadinista rebel leader and ex-law student, seized power from General Anastasio Somoza’s family dynasty.The marxist Sadinistas had succeeded in toppling the general by combining forces with non-Marxist opposition groups.
But Ortega (who had himself been jailed for seven years and tortured while in prison) is now in his fourth term in office.
In 2014, the Nicaraguan assembly (led by Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front) voted to scrap presidential terms.
In the 2016 elections – after making sure he had no real rivals – Ortega selected his wife (previously a government spokesperson) as ‘ vice-president and won another term in office.
One oppressive family dynasty has effectively been replaced by another – but they’re marxists, so would you expect anything different?
On 14 May 1948, David Ben Gurion declared Israel an independent state.
In November of the previous year the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into two separate entities – 56% to Jewish occupants and 44% to (Palestinian) Arab occupants.
Ever since the Holocaust, European Jews had been returning in large numbers to settle in Palestine.
The UN partition, and then Israel’s declaration of independence, led to violent internal conflict and subsequently a war against the allied forces of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt – every neighbouring state.
Israel won that war and extended its claim to 70% of Palestine.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel was again victorious and extended its territory even further, this time taking possession of Gaza, among other areas.
How is it that a nation born out of the need to avoid future genocide, in turn, becomes the persecutor?
With the legacy of German death camps, how does Israel not see Gaza as a new form of concentration camp?
Because they’re Jews, or because it’s Arabs who live in Gaza?
On an average day, 96 Americans die from bullet wounds, 50 women per month are killed by intimate partners using guns and 60% of the annual 13 000 gun deaths in the US are from suicide.
It is estimated that Americans, who comprise 5% of the world’s population, own 42% of the world’s private firearms.
By all accounts it would seem that the US has a gun problem.
Yet the NRA, established in 1871 in New York to promote the “marksmanship” of Union soldiers and involved in establishing gun control laws in the 1930s, now (as a civil rights organisation focused on the right to bear arms) vehemently opposes gun control in any form.
This despite worldwide research that clearly demonstrates fewer guns equal fewer deaths? Are the NRA simply hillbillies? Which brings us back to Jansen’s point.
Why do we see two realities, why are we unable to view the Willemse-Mallett saga as an opportunity to learn more about each other? We’re certainly not unique in that sense – it seems to be a global human trait.
If we look to recent events in our own metro council, clearly two realities are at play and no-one appears to be in the mood to learn.
But if we look to the US, to Palestine, to Nicaragua the lesson is clear.
Unless we find the way to look beyond our labels, we are likely to lock ourselves into a cycle of tears in which no party emerges as a winner, except death, who wins every time!