I get frustrated with the superficial way I perceive that some issues are being dealt with. We seem to avoid root causes and argue ad nauseam about symptoms. So even if the symptoms ease for a while, they always flare up again, sometimes worse than before.
Ban cellphones in schools or permit them, either way it will not solve the problem teachers are currently facing. It’s like asking the condemned man if he wants to die by lethal injection or lethal gas and then debating the pros and cons in front of him.
The debate over corporal punishment is similarly shallow. If corporal punishment is so necessary, then tell me why. There are enough good people who were raised without a lash or raising good children without lashes to ask the question, “Why would anyone need lashing in the first place.”
If you are for banning corporal punishment, then show and explain the alternatives you would provide and your plan to train teachers in their application. Also suggest how you would transition students accustomed to being held in check by the whip into the new system.
I am not seeing this kind of discussion in the Press nor hearing it on the electronic media. It may be asking a lot for this kind of conversation to be featured on the mass media. We live in a fast food era. It is the information age but we have been conditioned to take the information processed and predigested for easy assimilation. In the time of Twitter people are being programmed to snack on bite-sized messages throughout the day, rather than sitting to properly take in a fully thought-out information meal.
Nuanced arguments seem to be going the way of the dinosaur. Sensational sound bites in high definition black or white is how we are being served. Focused, disciplined conversation takes a back seat to personal declarations and decrees. It is not serving us well.
I have lived long enough to watch us continually put plaster on gunshot wounds, only to wonder later why we are still bleeding. ZRs are as much an issue as ever after removing the creative element from their paint jobs and sterilising their outward appearance.
Removing the creative element of the drum from African descended children at inter-school sports was supposed to have some kind of positive effect on their expression of sexuality, until cellphone videos started leaking out.
Now cutting the dreadlocks of female officers is supposed to help address crime in the country and tipping fees may be leading people to tip their garbage in the gullies once again. We like to sweep stuff out of sight until the waste turns to gas and starts stinking up the place.
Then there are the reflexive responses that continually pop up. Call in the church! Hang them! The cross and the noose are reocurring symbols of salvation. I am not against the church. It would be a bit much, though, to ask the same church that had such a prominent role in shaping the society we now complain about to be able to fix it.
I am not against hanging. If you think though, that we can hang criminals faster than we can breed them you will start to sound a bit psychotic to me.
It is easier to recycle slogans and ideas than it is to innovate. Given the lack of encouragement of critical thinking and independent thought in our educational system, it should not be a surprise if we fail to look very deeply into issues. We fail to look deeply into ourselves.
Not being able to deeply appreciate the impact of our distant and near past on our present state, and failing to comprehensively and head-on address the lingering past is one of our society’s major failings.
We are also a superficially conservative society. Conservative on the surface, to protect our wassy core. Conservatism makes sense when you have something solid to conserve. When the social soil starts eroding it is time to open our minds a bit. Our bashment slip is showing.
I understand if some fear that opening our minds will cause further erosion. Change is often scary. It is fear that keeps us from digging deep and finding creative approaches. Paralysed by fear of change and the rate of change at the same time, we “if” at finding solutions in hopes that the problem will melt away spontaneously.
To make us feel like we are actually doing something we poke at symptoms. We suffer from symptomism. Symptomism is the tendency to place too much focus on the symptoms of an issue rather than the underlying issues or root causes.
Root causes are often hard to reach. They may be buried under years of history, an ocean of denial, mountains of red tape and the debris of false logic and reasoning. To get at root causes takes time, energy, expertise, and maturity. Above all else there must be the will to get well.
Could the fault be that people don’t care if they are cured as long as
they can avoid symptoms? At the end of the day it is the symptoms that we feel and not the illness itself. The suffering could be so bad that an ease in the symptoms will be a high priority. Even at the risk of causing other problems.
Supposed the doctors are so unable to relate to the patient’s symptoms they don’t empathise enough to really push for a cure? Ebola in Africa was not a research focus until westerners started catching it. Politicians and well off folk who may be well positioned to treat society’s ills may feel so immune they just don’t have that sense of urgency. That is, until business gets interfered with. I heard one business man say after a number of robberies, that we need to get to the source of the problem… and hire more security. Smh.
Adrian Green is a creative communications specialist. Email Adriangreen14@gmail.com