THE LONG DEPARTED TRAIN

“A photo taken along the Sea-Point promenade on a Sunday afternoon in Cape Town during the winter of 2019. The teal and ethereal imagery could be said to be a clairvoyant representation of what would come to pass in the coming months.“

By the C.A

The train has long departed, never to return again. That is the imagery I have parochially chosen to invoke, despite its ambiguity. After a series of events commencing from the month of February of 2020, causing a domino effect rarely seen over the course of the past century, it is safe to say that the World has reached a point of no return.

The global Covid-19 pandemic has directly or indirectly helped expose the incorrigible flaws of a system too reliant on monetarism, the free-market, supply side economics, austerity, and financialization.

This dire situation, coupled with a redundant mainstream way of interpreting the world into simplistic dichotomies, i.e. Capitalist, Socialist, Liberal, Conservative, Western, Non-Western has been counter-productive to say the least in offering pragmatic solutions to human problems.

These flaws may seem trivial at first, but they do tell a very vivid story, that perhaps as benefited very few, while disempowering most of the Planets inhabitants, humans, animals and eco-systems.

Over the course of the past few decades we have witnessed the notorious rise in Environment degradation, economic shocks and crisis’, incessant income and wealth inequality, rising unemployment as well as the implications of automation on the future landscape of the Global Labor Market.

It would not be alarmist in noting the rapid rise in levels of depression in adolescents, further compounded by the conundrums of tele-migration, tertiary time, economic precarity as well as the McCarthyistic style sanctioning of universal health care and universal basic income.

The original tenets of Capitalism conceived and echoed by the founding theorists of the Free Market, namely the likes of Smith, Locke and Ricardo can be seen to have been co-opted on a monolithic scale.

This pernicious heist of free-market ideologues has periodically mutated into what I would call a religion embedded in covert Greed, Self-aggrandizement, a pervasive negation of responsibility, narcissism, Conspicuous consumption, grandiosity as well as a wide-spread psycho-social reliance on external validation.

This in turn has innocuously rendered Co-operation, fairness, peace, intrinsic well-being, acknowledgement of our common humanity, shared histories and destinies as tacitly redundant and outdated moral priorities. Every week which passes by during the lock-down seems to organically bring to light a pre-existing malady neatly hidden away in a dark corner of our collective minds, only to be exposed on a magnified scale.

Poverty, racism, class prejudices, cultural biases, corruption, vast inequality of outcomes all camouflaged beneath the skin of Globalization, Multi-Culturalism and Freedom. This is in no way a cynical and simplistic attack on Globalization and the entrenchment of free-market ideals, it is more of a skepticism towards Neo-liberal capitalism as a cultural construct.

Perhaps sometimes, things have to hit rock bottom before they can ever get better. There lays a long series of events that have foreshadowed the current dilemma we find ourselves in. The Dot-com bubble, 9/11, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the bailing out of your global investment banks, the Marikana massacre in South Africa, The Arab Spring, The Yellow vests and rising unemployment among the youth of Western Europe.

To top it all off, a crippling health pandemic emanating out of Wuhan, China, compounded by Global resentment and racial tensions ignited by the abhorrent modern-day lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police in the State of Minnesota in America.

The resurgence of youth activism was a visceral result of the Rhodes/Fees must fall Protests by South Africa’s frustrated youth, looking for conceptual solutions in the form of Decolonization at Universities. It is also myopic to overlook the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, from Iraq, to Lebanon, from Yemen to Libya and Palestine.

The inhabitants of the Global village continue to be burdened by an ever widening gap between the worlds top 10% and the other 90% Trade War intensified by Donald Trump’s administration, the information crisis of “fake news”, “cancel culture” and the “weaponization of liberal or leftist ideals” against those refusing to conform to binary thinking.

The train has long departed, and this now leaves us with the existential burden of how humanity can come together to build a new train, destined for a more natural and humanist destination.