The Black Friday demonstration organised outside the SABC's Auckland Park offices.
COMMUNITY
A recent Facebook post on my timeline read: “Dear fellow middle-class and affluent countrymen. Wearing black is slimming and all, but it won’t effect change. If you want change, you must take real action, put yourself at risk and stand in solidarity with all of South Africa.”
Wearing a flattering black outfit to your nine-to-five office gig is not going to cut it. So, what will? As a middle-class, affluent resident who lives in relative comfort and has options to live abroad, I have to ask myself this question if I claim to support democracy as an ideal.
Yes, it helps to send WhatsApp messages, update my profile picture, wear black or even drive to Church Square to make an appearance. It helps to get engaged and irate when shit hits the fan and it definitely feels good to voice my opinion on how our leaders and parties do not live up to my expectations or fall short of delivering on my democratic rights.
But what about my democratic responsibilities? What am I doing for the other 364 days of the year? How am I contributing to the sociopolitical climate of this country within my own sphere of influence? What am I doing to build democracy?
Democracy can refer to “direct self-government over all the people, by all the people, for all the people”. There is no reference to political leaders bearing the bulk of the weight when the process might best be carried “by the people, for the people”.
We are the people and we should be as empowered as the people we vote for. It may not be enough to show up at the polling station and hope that the powers that be will do their job. Clearly they’re not.
Playing our part in a democracy is more complex. It requires a quiet, slow, tedious and unglamorous process called community building.
This work is both material and spiritual. It takes decades and offers no quick fixes. It requires time, sacrifice and dedication — qualities few of us are demonstrating, least of all our politicians.
I’m talking about a gradual transformation of society and its moral fabric, because the process should have a purpose beyond the mere betterment of material conditions if it is to effect lasting change. So, how do we achieve that?
First, focusing our efforts on the future generation is time well spent.
A fundamental concept to consider is the spiritual dimension of humanity. Societal development must express values such as honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, generosity and other qualities of the spirit.
“The individual is not merely a self-interested economic unit, striving to claim an ever-greater share of the world’s material resources,” reads a statement from the Bahá’i World Centre. Rather, “man’s merit lies in service and virtue”.
The spiritual education of children and young people in schools, through our individual efforts and through community initiatives, is important. Such efforts must transcend individual religious dogmas, embracing the common threads that exist in all religious traditions.
Mining the gems of character within our youth is paramount if we want to see quality future leadership. We must uproot the self-interest that currently informs and corrupts every aspect of our sociopolitical reality.
In the face of corrupt and paralysing partisanship, which some say is devolving into a dangerous form of tribalism, we need to bridge the divides between various cultural, religious and economic factions.
On the simplest levels, this means increased involvement with our neighbours and communities. It means finding out about each other, volunteering and walking a path of service together with people who look, live and think differently to us.
In this way we can knit together our interests and realise that, far from being divergent, they are actually complementary and depend on each other for their realisation.
This kind of grass-roots involvement requires that we move out of our comfort zones and create the world we want to live in. It means giving of our time and financial resources for the betterment of our communities and the upliftment of those within our sphere of influence.
It means educating the children of those who work in our homes and taking a real interest in their lives.
In so doing, we are taking “real action” and “standing in solidarity with all of South Africa”.
This kind of democratic chutzpah is not convenient. It requires that we don’t get sidetracked by the illusion of involvement that most popular and social media-driven opportunities offer. It requires, instead, that we dig deep to align ourselves with that for which we stand.
Leyla Tavernaro-Haidarian (PhD) is a researcher for the department of journalism, film and television at the University of Johannesburg