It may well be that as a nation we have grown comfortable with what has become a propensity for debating the issues that face us ‘to death,’ taking them in turn, turning them inside out, then, without making even as much as the slightest effort to apply a solution, moving on to the next issue or set of issues, ventilating them as if they were no more than pretexts for a casual intellectual exercise rather than real and pressing issues, requiring urgent attention.
Our overwhelming and seemingly insoluble solid waste management woes come readily to mind. One doubts that there are too many other public issues that have been debated with the same level of frequency than what has become our near complete loss of control over how we dispose of our solid waste. After years of periodic public discourse there has still been no solution. We are not, currently, in the season for public discourse on solid waste disposal, but you can be sure that its turn will come again – sooner rather than later.
Other issues have slipped on, then off the debating carousel; issues like child abuse and violence against women and trafficking in persons and crime and the police and the killing fields in some of our mining communities. These issues have had their respective turns on the debating circuit but not in a single case have the discourses brought anything even remotely resembling a lasting solution.
So that – at least so it would seem –we have arrived at a juncture where public discourse on important, even critical national issues, has become an end in itself rather than a means to an end, as if we are satisfied with a circumstance in which the solution reposes in everyone simply having their say.
It is a pattern of social behaviour that continues to take us nowhere. The truth is that while we must never seek to place restraints on free speech we cannot simply place all of our important national concerns and challenges in cauldrons of chatter, the returns from which really make no meaningful contribution to resolving those concerns. That makes for a wasteful and counterproductive existence, a state of being in which you remain unsure as to the rate of progress we are making in tackling and solving critical national issues, or whether, in fact, we are making any progress at all.
Where are we, for example, on the issue of trying to eradicate the practice of simply depositing our garbage on the streets? The successive rounds of public discourse have not, it seems, positioned us any closer to eradicating this degenerate practice. It is the same with the failure of the police to get on top of crime and violence against women and child abuse and the persistence of the killing fields in some of our interior communities. Each of these worrisome national challenges has seen countless hours of discourse that has not led in the direction that we might have hoped.
The question that arises has to do with how we can fashion those endless hours of discourse into means to meaningful ends rather than treating them as ends in themselves. That would involve doing a great deal more talking to each other rather than at each other, the latter being what we do much of the time. In this regard we can, without any feelings of guilt, place the blame on a political culture that understands little beyond polarization and which is now firmly set in its ways.
It is a culture that may well have inflicted permanent damage on the capacity of this nation to work together. Political polarization has institutionalized forms of communication that are, for the most part, instinctively combative. These days, there is virtually no discourse across political lines unless that discourse is underpinned by disagreement and acrimony, so that even if there were issues on which agreement might otherwise be reached, the political space in which to work to try and reach it is almost non-existent.
The polarization extends deep into the wider society, so that what ought to be constructive and problem-solving public discourses are in fact confrontations between and amongst rival points of view expressed by rival factions, whose only motive is to be heard by their supporters. These discourses have little to do with the meeting of minds.
We appear to have settled for these combative discourses on even the most critical of national issues; this, to a point where it no longer seems to matter that the protracted discourses continue to take us nowhere and that we need to find ways of fashioning solutions out of them. In the final analysis unless we find ways of transforming the various points of view into tools with which to address and solve the problems that we articulate, we are, as a nation, on a hiding to nowhere. The least we can do at this juncture is to accept this as a truth that has to change.
