They’re flanked by left-wing Antifa, baby-eating communists and a dragon named AfriForum. The manosphere is trying to turn every male without 8cm into Joe Rogan, and the feminists think every phallus is a signal of the end of days. VAT increases will spell the end of civilisation, and Cape Town is the spring from which all evil belches forth. Good God, the media is so melodramatic these days.
Maybe I’m naive (or old), or perhaps I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses, but it didn’t used to be like this. Back in 1994 — before Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar inspired Matt Damon — Oom Eugene Terre’Blanche drove a car bomb into the airport. This was around the time we were all watching him and his friends doing Nazi salutes in the veld, and gave it the same amount of thought as a mom watching her son play with Pokémon cards. In those days, serious-faced journalists with snore told us how Afrikaans nationalists were plotting to overthrow the nascent rainbow nation. Maybe I was too young, but it seemed at the time that most of us took note — and then carried on with our lives. In a similar way, you may spot a goat doing a cartwheel on the highway; it’ll shock you enough to pause, but you’re too South African to get fooled into pulling over and investigating.
Today, though, any and everything sends us off the deep end.
The best two examples of how we’re developing a Victorian amount of hysteria are Jacob Zuma and Donald Trump. For reasons too boring to mention, any time we hear about either in public, everyone’s knee-jerk reaction is to cry bloody murder. If Zuma’s MK party fed starving Ethiopian children, South Africans living outside KwaZulu-Natal would accuse him of raiding Mbeki’s pantry to do it.
As for Donald Jezebel Trump and his tariff tomfoolery — on the surface, everyone is crying blue murder about tariffs, but how much do we really care? Yes, it’s fun to beat our chests at the water cooler, but tariffs have existed forever. At the beginning of the year, Europe slapped huge tariffs on China to protect their electric vehicle market, and the only people who cared were finance bros with a fondness for Colombian marching powder. But all of a sudden we are all tariff experts who have a deep understanding of the US-Lesotho trade deficit.
As it turns out, tariffs are really common, but we all want to be special. Will they make things more expensive? Yes, but so will being alive. Drawing breath is a lifelong exercise in looking back and telling young people about how cheap petrol used to be. Yet the news tells us the Tariff War of 2025 is the worst thing that has happened since Michael Jackson and Prince allegedly got into a fist fight.
And it’s the same everywhere. Everyone who doesn’t share our political leaning is some sort of “-ist”. We all have some version of an argument we want to win and nothing tastes better than performing an intellectual slam dunk on the streets of social media. Except — if you’re old enough — that’s also hollow. We may have moved past it, but for a brief time we lived in the golden age of discourse, when Trevor Noah was still funny, when John Vlismas could make fun of anyone and we all laughed because we weren’t all trying to revel in our victimhood.
The result is we’re so easy to trigger. There was a time when a member of the NP and the ANC could be friends. Now, God forbid, you think there should be tighter border control. Or the opposite. The point is, for all the noise we make about connection in the digital age, our tolerance for opposing views has never been lower. And the media (yes, that’s us) is fuelling it. Nothing gets clicks and engagements like outrage. Nothing goes viral like a video saying “XX DESTROYS XX”. No-one debates — we all just shout into the void and hope that we are loud enough to win.
You may spot a goat doing a cartwheel on the highway; it’ll shock you enough to pause, but you’re too South African to get fooled into pulling over and investigating
And all of that is fine if your idea of a pleasant existence is sitting in a room where your parents constantly scream. For the rest of us, maybe not. Once upon a time, a young, sexy Nelson Mandela got on TV and had a debate with some white dude. I remember when media was about airing people’s views, whatever they were. And then we all sat in the marketplace of ideas and decided if this made sense.
I want those days back. And not for me, but because some orange-faced people can say “they’re eating the dogs” and win an election. We are losing our discernment and that’s because we like one-minute videos where some 30-year-old tells us that [insert villain] is the second coming of Hitler.
He/she/they aren’t. Hitler killed 12-million people. Trump just wants three more buildings named after him. Zuma is not Satan, he was just corrupt. Feminists don’t want to castrate everything with a penis, they just want equality and safety for women.
All this hysteria is exhausting. We cannot be on asteroid alert all the time. VAT hikes are difficult, but we cannot treat each one as if Lucifer has arrived on Earth. Because when a crimson gent with pointy ears ascends from beneath Germiston, we're going to be too drained of adrenaline to manage.
So let’s all calm down. Be measured. Do yoga. Have some sex. Whatever floats your boat, but relax a bit. And when your favourite media outlet tries to rile you up for ratings, remember your children/cousins/nieces and nephews/friends are outside and actually want to hear about your new sewing rabbit hole.
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