YESTERDAY morning I woke up thinking of William Shakespeare to the point where I found myself paraphrasing one of his most famous lines and mulling over it.
Agreeing to Disagree with Delta Milayo Ndou
“To care or not to care? That is the question.”
It’s been one of those weeks where so much happens and it all rubs you the wrong way (in varying degrees of course), but none of it singularly can get a rise out of you. All of it put together leads to sensory overload.
For instance, I woke up wondering if I should really care about the fact that Tinopona Katsande is being racked over coals because a sex tape she made in private had been leaked and was now being publicly consumed.
The answer to that particular musing was “yes, I should care because her privacy has been violated and I am very touchy about people being violated in any way”.
Having figured out that I do care about her plight, I wondered whether I should do anything about it — like write a blog or something in defence of people’s privacy, but I couldn’t muster enough oomph to get started on it because there was something else that was making my blood pressure rise.
This whole Cabinet business. Yes, indeed, I lay awake in bed for a while processing this frustrating reality that there are only three women ministers in the Cabinet. So insulting.
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I didn’t even need to ask myself whether I cared about this issue or not. The fact that it was upsetting me so much was enough proof of how invested I am in women empowerment, particularly in the area of meaningful female political representation.
Having decided that I do, in fact, care very much about the composition of this Cabinet, I wondered what (if anything) I could do about it.
Go online and join all the other people venting on Facebook and Twitter? Write a blog or perhaps devote a whole newspaper column to ranting about it?
What would any of these actions change? What difference would it make? In the end, I made myself a cup of coffee instead and less than 10 minutes into sipping it, a power cut gave me a rude awakening and presented me with something additional to contemplate.
How was I going to iron my top without any electricity and why don’t these power cuts ever adhere to the set schedules? How am I going to navigate my way to work in the traffic jams caused by non-functional traffic lights at the height of Harare’s peak hour?
In the end, I just shrugged and wore a decently creased top to work figuring that there are some things (like protesting against the invasion of people’s privacy, or railing against the total disregard of the constitutional provisions on equality that the current Cabinet formation represents), that I cannot change.
So I found myself thinking of my Shakespeare-inspired thought: “To care or not to care? That is the question.”
If I care, what difference will it make? And if I stop caring, what’s the worst that could happen?
Well, I’m beginning to think that caring is one of those things whereby you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.
Indifference is the easiest thing in life. It is the most convenient cope-out of all. Just decide you don’t care. Decide you’re not going to lose any sleep over anything that doesn’t appear to remotely affect your bread-and-butter issues.
Things like the price of bread, the availability of water and electricity — those are important matters to concern oneself with.
The small matter of who heads up the ministries that superintend over the provision of these necessities can be foregone as long as our basics are covered.
But the problem is that if you stop caring, you give power to those who would run the country aground and surrender your agency as a person to determine the course of your own life (to whatever extent it is within your means to influence political actors).
Five years is a long time not to care.
I can wager that whatever happens between now and 2018 will largely be determined by the number of people who cared enough to do something, anything, even small things like giving a toss.
I’m beginning to think that under the circumstances, caring could be the only patriotic thing left to do.
Lose sleep over something. Find an issue to care about because sometimes caring is the first step to action.
Perhaps it’s too much to ask. But that’s just me. I could be wrong. We can always agree to disagree. Delta Milayo Ndou is a journalist, writer, activist and blogger
