Being

How do you want to live?

I love where I live. I can get in my car, drive about and help people, earn money, visit places. I can go shopping and buy what I need, and even what I want, and trundle home again.

No one tells me what I can and cannot eat, I do.
No one tells me who I can and cannot love, I do.
No one tells me what I can and cannot think (although those reactive, emotional decision making nutcases, the woke, and the religious, believe they can).

I wander about any time of the day or night in safety. There are no pro-religious demonstrations here and no ethnic or gender riots, either. Everyone who lives here knows they want a safe and peaceful life.

This is freedom.

Furthermore, the roads are clean. Our taxes pay for sewage, water, electricity (infrastructure management at least – we are fucked if that goes private), phones and internet are all available with ease. There are no daily accidents or murders or chaos.

Of course I want to live here!

Extended from this want, I want this lifestyle to be protected. I do not want people to come here who would change it. I don’t care about race, gender, creed or cause, as long as you want to live safely, peacefully, and respectfully.

Why wouldn’t you?

There are so many people on this planet who do not have a sense of the wider community, such as the city, the nation, or even the world, as part of their identity. There are so many people who want to end this way of life because they perceive injustice or evil in this way of living.

We must protect ourselves and proactively maintain our way of life if we wish to keep it.

Perhaps, one day, I will wish to live without sewage and running water, and not care for electricity or a weather-proof home. I doubt it. If I do, I will find that place and go and live there. I certainly won’t be destroying other people’s lives to have them conform to my choices.

I watched an ABC presentation on the immigration policies brought in by the Dutch. That country cannot financially support mass immigration and the society is becoming like Beirut. The presenter made the false equivalency between Nazi Germany murdering a million people, and the Dutch implementing policy to protect themselves agains financial and social destruction.

This is the way woke reactionaries contextualise the world: a poor, teary, fat lady in traditional garb upset that the people paying for her life would like to respect their traditions.

Do we have the right to protect ourselves?

Yes.

What about historical and systemic injustices?

Education.

There is no country or larger group of Africans who have created a society. I have been watching a lot of Franck Zanu. He is brilliant. He notes with great insight that the reason has nothing to do with race, but with culture – and the lack of awareness of a larger identity.

He observes that African peoples are tribal, small units of extended families which vie for resources with each other. There is no concept of ‘nation’ because there has never been the necessity for that concept to arise in those cultures. Between Sub-Sahara and South Africa, the creeks flow clean and food grows from the trees and sprouts from the ground. There has never been the need to plan, to pre-empt, or to co-operate on grand scales like we have done in Europe and Asia.

There are many Africans and their descendants who are compelled to blame the whites, privilege, the patriarchy, historical injustices and financial inequality for their ills. Instead of clarifying the mechanics of their cultural values, people are seeking to lay blame.

In South Africa, it moved from segregation to systemic inequality to financial inequality and has now degenerated into tribal opportunism and xenophobia.

Psychologically, blame is the position of the coward and the imbecile. The resolution is taking responsibility for oneself and accountability for one’s actions.

Watching Zanu’s dialogues keeps prompting me back to the question, ‘How do you want to live?’ None of his guests have yet answered that simple question, being trapped within the hamster wheel of blame.

I want to live as I am: in a secular society based on impartial law, reason, critical thinking, least possible harm. I love the science, medicine, social welfare, and promotion of kindness we have. I want us to be safe from ideology, to protect ourselves from delusion, and to continue improving our selves and our societies.

How do you want to live?