Writing the 2019 Election: The Young Guns and reruns of Little House on the Prairie By Ismail Lagardien
The election lists are out. We are obsessed with lists. Psychotherapists may explain the obsession with list-making as something as straightforward as a reminder of things to do, or to provide some kind of reassurance, or to identify things that may be contaminated and that need to be cleansed or avoided.
It is, of course, not always appropriate to extrapolate these individual obsessions to societies. But there’s an argument to be made that there has been mass contamination at the intersection between politics and government. While it is easy to point to politicians and well-placed public servants for their crimes and misdemeanours, it is worth bearing in mind that, like most societies in search of meaning, South Africans have manifested some maladaptive behaviours that make very many of us rather unpleasant people.
If we look around us, we see signs of violence, cruelty, lies and truly abhorrent behaviour which may be explained as a kind of psychological; when the trauma of a brutal event long since passed produces anxieties and pathologies in a later generation. In other words, apartheid may be a generation behind us, but in many cases, it remains the cause of all our social and political problems.
The trauma of the apartheid era has had intergenerational effects on the current generation of young people – and adults who were born after the end of apartheid. While there is evidence of this sequela from Serbia to Argentina, the structural violence and brutality of the Khmer Rouge has produced echoes in Cambodia today. This is probably the best example of a type of psychological sequela.
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