Arb thoughts

The first thing i noticed this morning was the light, soft and pink and gentle. Joburg has a peculiar secret, it's light. You have days where the african sun glares at you with a million watts of pure heat, and other days where it seems almost invisible behind transluscent clouds ... and the light comes at you from all directions at once. I look out the window and there are no shadows ...

Typical winter morning, dry and cold and noisy, but i'm grateful for the rise in temperature over yesterday, which very, very cold. The air is still clear from the strong winds of the week, the smog hasn't had time to settle in yet, but the wind cleared out the dust that was bedevilling us all.

The traffic situation has gone from bad to worse, it's just in a natural decline, with the only funtioning part of the system the brave medics who pick up the pieces afterwards. I past 2 sets of metro pigs on the way to work, both sets produced horrendous results in the morning traffic. They messed up the highway for miles, by sitting at the offramp and creating a bottleneck, exactly at the worst possible place to create a bottleneck. The roadblock in rivonia was just another power trip, already reports of bribe seeking are coming in, and the traffic is just worse than ever, gridlock. It's too stupid for words, but nothing is done against the hundreds of people who are being murdered by public transport each month.

I've been thinking so deeply about this for so long, i'm astonished to have had a new insight. I know i know how the mind works, but it's the part about ruminating that we have trouble with. Waiting for your mind to tell you what it knows. So, i am of course patient in that respect, and then i realised: patience.

The lack of patience is the single biggest cause of accidents in South Africa. Since nobody has any intelligent data, i can't prove anything, but i'll say that over 95% of accidents are preceded by someone deciding to "not wait". Impatience is what is killing us, hurry up and get there before anyone else.

This attitude is countrywide, and deeply entrenched. It's worse in joburg of course, and is sadly a symptom only, it's a reaction, but one that is spiralling out of control. It's not speed, it's not always breaking a road rule, and it's not even bad driving, as such. But when you add any of the above to someone in a hurry, it becomes an accident ... like sex = babies. Not 100% of the time, just enough to make you careless, and of course when the baby arrives, everyone acts all surprised.

This is the message that must be used nationwide, and it will take print, radio, tv and billboards to achieve, but it it the only way to reduce the death tolls. Other things must happen too, jmpd must be fired, all of them, and an entirely new set of rules drafted for them, and entirely different modus operandi. But until we can do that, it's up to us. Government will do nothing except tax us, time for us to refuse them that too.