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What's the issue?

What's the issue?

Author: Tomas Yoko
Date: 2019-09-27

It is Heritage Day as I sit and write this edition, you are probably braiing right now, ice-cold beverage in hand or close at hand at least. Thoughts of heritage turn to my own, a large part of which is Irish. One of the first nations in the world to suffer mass slavery, forced on them by the British. There's a lot more to my heritage, as there is yours, and as a fourth generation South African, my heritage is also South African.

Then I though of cultural heritage. "Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Not all legacies of past generations are "heritage", rather heritage is a product of selection by society." So we choose our heritage. That makes it even more difficult to understand.

If I could choose not to have load shedding as part of my South African heritage, I would. However DA Shadow Minister of Public Enterprises, Natasha Mazzone is ringing alarm bells that warn of a failure in ESKOM's recovery plan, which could lead to load shedding as soon as October. Who would have guessed ESKOM says not to panic, they've got this.

A big part of heritage is language and Trade Union Solidarity announced plans to build a three hundred million Rand Afrikaans university, Sol-Tech, in Centurion, but Higher Education MinisterBlade Nzimande says he is still waiting for the application. This bit of heritage we can change, please.

Some heritage you just cannot deny, you cannot force out, you have to accept, denial will only lead to further denial and that is a downward spiral.

With all the craziness going on I heard the sanest argument coming out of a politicians mouth for decades when lawyer Michael Mansfield said that eating meat could become illegal. And the crime of it would be ecocide, the impact on climate change. I know, I can just see a whole lot of you looking at me the way that Gruta Thunberg looked at Donald Trump at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. She really lambasted them at the summit saying, "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"

I will mention the report on several thousands of scientists saying that Global Warming Crisis is a hoax, but I won't go there. The plastic crisis is huge but we're all still turning a blind eye to Fukushima. So anything is possible.

Anyway Donald was blabbing away in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and it must have been painful to watch as he exchanged one foot for the other, contradicting himself. He roasted socialism, probably unaware of how many families are on food stamps back home, and lambasted Iran for "menacing behaviour" and said that Iran is one of the greatest threat facing peaceful nations of the world. The hypocrisy of these words coming out of the president who's military forces occupy seventy per cent of the worlds countries. The best thing he could do is side with Russia and save America.