How am I ??

Posted by Keegan w.

I am as depressed as all hell.

• Our northern neighbour (Zimbabwe) is fast turning into the most ruthless military dictatorship on the globe
• Our president, Mr T Mbeki, doesn't say a word - saving his anger to tell other countries to butt out of Africa's problems
• Our next president narrowly escaped a rape charge recently and is currently throwing around his political clout to try squash the pending fraud charges against him. By the way, he has about 9 wives and never went past grade 7 at school.
  
• Food, electricity and petrol prices continue to rocket. (The electricity system, we're told, could collapse at any minute)
  
• Interest rates have jumped 5% in the past 18 months
• The Rand continues to weaken and one gets the feeling that any moment its going to collapse to join the Zimbabwe dollar and other toilet-paper currencies, rendering us South Africans "currency prisoners", never able to emigrate even if legally we could.
• Those that aren't yet currency prisoners are leaving in droves - all our doctors, engineers and teachers - gone. Not to mention just about every close school and university friend of mine.
  
• Did I mention the violent crime in our country? No, I won't even go there.
  
• The people in the townships, under increasing pressure due to soaring prices, are very angry. They recently vented this anger against refugees from other African countries in the most barbaric manner, showing an ugly tribalism that we thought was only found in places north of us like Rwanda.
  
• What will it take for this anger to be redirected at South African whites - surely more responsible for their predicament than Somalians and Mozambiquans?
• In the meantime South African whites demonstrate their totally superficial "caring attitudes" to their black brethren. In Cape Town it is now super-trendy to donate food and clothes or even volunteer to work at one of the local refugee camps. Good stuff people, but what about all the genuine South Africans that were born here and are also cold, starving and struggling? Why weren't you all clamouring to help them all along? (maybe if you did the Xenophobic attacks wouldn't have happened in the first place). Why don't you just go round up a whole lot of starving street children from the city right now and put them up in tents, donate food and clothes? Helloooo "Charity begins at home".
  

Add to this that we're in the midst of a cold, grey and wet winter down here in Cape Town and you'll see why I'm left wondering whether this is really depression I'm suffering from, or just level-headed, objective and accurate despair.

BPG says I should just stop watching the news (as he has). He says that right now us SA BiPolar dudes need a positive mind more than an informed mind. I suppose you could call it the "blissfull ignorance" approach. Maybe he is right.