The Twelve Apostles
from Clifton Beach, Cape Town, South Africa
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Sentried at the southern tip of the African continent, Cape Town
(the legislative capital of South Africa) cuts the
same splendid vistas today with Devil's Peak, Table Mountain, the
Twelve Apostles, and Lion's Head mesmerizing the majestic skyline
as took the breaths away from the first seventeenth century ocean
explorers (Vasco Da Gama, Jan van Riebeeck et al) to these parts.
This is one of the richest countries in the world, producing
seventy percent or more of all its diamonds, gold, platinum, and
uranium. The internationally renowned Kruger National Park,
Hluhluwe Game Reserve, and Okavango Swamps provide wild life
refuges and sanctuaries on a par with none. Then when you
additionally throw in
the finest surfing waves
on the planet
you realize when continents and countries were formed and gifts and
riches were handed out, South Africa was at the front of the line.
So whenever I confront the way it is as distinct from
the way I'd like it to be or even the way it
should be, South Africa presents the quintessential
paradox:
in the midst of plenty, why is life still a struggle here?
It's been years since apartheid ended. That for sure
is a massive shift. Now its peoples are dealing with the new
realities of life in a fledgeling capitalist democracy. The
unarticulated question on everyone's lips is "Why isn't freedom
free?".
The United States has dealt with this very issue for decades. We
call it "The American Dream". We've an image of what life
could be, of what life should be. For
years, immigrants (legal and otherwise) have flocked to America in
droves in search of it. To be sure, there's tangible evidence of a
relatively small percentage of men and women, self made, realizing
the American Dream. Yet most go looking for America but don't
find it anywhere (as Columbia Pictures' original Easy
Rider poster may have said).
That's always interested me. No, not negating the American Dream.
I
God
Bless every day I'm
privileged
to live in the United States free to pursue and to live the
American Dream. I'm referring to the people who, while aspiring to
the American Dream or to whatever they consider the American
Dream to be "don't find it anywhere". When we don't find
it, what does that tell us? I assert it tells us less about America
than it tells us about something even more pertinent: the stock we
place in our expectations, hopes, and dreams.
So it is in South Africa. Do peoples' expectations of life as it is
today, even in the aftermath of the once impossible to
vanquish apartheid, tell us anything about South Africa?
Or, congruent with life in the United States, do they tell us
something even more pertinent about our hopes and dreams, the same
thing about people's hopes and dreams in any country anywhere on
Earth?
Werner
Erhard
says "Life is a ripoff when you expect to get what you want. Life
works when you choose what you got. Actually what you got is what
you chose. To move on, choose it.".
Life in South Africa, like life in the United States of America,
doesn't make the expected results of the dream
available to everyone free of charge just because they're
expected. Actually it's worse than that. Life in South Africa,
like life in the United States of America, can't make
the expected results of the dream available to everyone free of
charge. But there's a key distinction. In the United States we're
aware if you want it, it's pure naïvete to expect
you'll get it just because you want it. However, you can
have it if you invent it as a possibility then enroll
others in your having gotten it. In South Africa, there's a
sincerely charming, unripe, immature undercurrent of expectation
which sounds something like this:
We didn't have it during the apartheid years. Now that
apartheid's over, we want it, we want it all, and we want it
now.
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