This past weekend I attended an event. The speaker who clearly spoke with passion and conviction, touched on our upcoming elections. I have mentioned before that I am a touch A-Political, but what got me hanging onto his words was not so much the words, but rather that I felt I had to be on high alert just incase the poor man passed the Rubicon of frenzy and suffered a minor stroke. He did turn quite red in the face and had I not been witness to the speech, I may have wondered about the heavy breathing that took center stage every so often. His message can be seen as a bit controversial, but the point he tried to make, I must agree with. You see, he said that right now, where we find ourselves as a nation, we have extraordinarily little to make us proud to be South African. A World Cup Rugby win can only sustain us so much, before the reality of the deeply sorry state of our beautiful nation seeps back into our everyday life. You see, our young democracy is now 30 years old. Which is the same age as our oldest son. But unlike our son, the country is indeed in a sorry state.

I often muse to Colin how our two sons live their lives. Looking back at myself at 30, I certainly was not that responsible, clean living, health conscious, self-aware, climate aware, money wise, carbon footprint conscious, fit, non-smoking, non-drinking, goal driven, and career focused, that our sons are. No, not at all. I grew up a Gen Xer. That is the generation born between 1965 and 1976. Colin only just falls towards the end of the Baby Boomers, and I fall just into Gen X. But what we have in common is this:

We thrive on diversity, challenge, responsibility (This may have something to do with a house key on a string around your neck. After school, you let yourself in, made your own Peanut-Butter-and Syrup sarmie for lunch and did your homework – all with no supervision, because our Baby Boomer parents were out working.) We are creative and adaptable. The 80’s was our playground, we were fortunate enough to have known Madonna and Michael Jackson when they were both still flesh-and-blood humans, before they became Botox and Plastic junkies. Our parents, school and society instilled a certain moral code into us. You did not get pregnant while still at school. The worst naughty you could do was to smoke. Cigarettes, that is. Anything more than tobacco was hard core, and anything stronger, or more potent than dope, was simply not within our realm. We saw it in the movies. We heard about it on the radio. We knew that our film and music idols (the ones we had posters of on our bedroom walls) did bad stuff, and we admired their BAD! We dreamt of being James Dean bad, and Prince weird, Sindy Lauper punk and Duran Duran spunk. Those were indeed the best years to have grown up. It did leave us with some challenges, though.

We became the generation that had to learn about technology. Our children were born with technology. They were born to have flat screen TVs and home PCs. It comes to them as naturally as breathing. We on the other hand, had to learn technology, and the learning curve has run out of uphill. Every time Windows updates to a better version, I pack my backpack, call my sherpa, and start climbing that Everest of learning. But we do OK. We have raised good children, and we celebrate them for the young adults they have become.

Unfortunately, like the speaker over the weekend, I can’t say the same for South Africa. We are a resilient nation. We have been through so much. Pre 1994, and post 1994. But this young adult we now have is not doing well at all. As much as the world as we knew it had to change (thank heavens), one can only look on in awe (and not the good awe, but the flabbergasted awe) at what is happening around us. I do not want to make this political (because I am A Political, remember!) but I do have a heart. And my heart breaks when I look around me and see the desperation of our country. As a Gen Xer, we were raised to be patriotic. I have not felt spontaneously patriotic for a long time. It is a tad difficult to be patriotic in the dark (due to load shedding) and travel the road less traveled (because of potholes). It is equally difficult to give to Ceasar (aka the Tax Man) what is his, when you witness the corruption and wastage of resources. It becomes exceedingly difficult to remain optimistic.

I have found myself in a strange space lately. I would have random thoughts or memories popping into my mind. Many of those memories are of a younger me, and where I was at a certain time of my life. And here comes the strange thing: I feel like a parent looking at my younger self, and I feel such compassion for that person I was. You poor little thing, I would think. Why were you so hard on yourself? It may seem strange, and perhaps I am experiencing early onset of Dementia, but I have developed such empathy for my younger me. The women out there will understand. Because all of us: we did it, and still do it to ourselves.

I can only hope that in time to come, I will reflect on this time we are living in. The one that had the event speaker so overflowing with passion and conviction, and that hindsight will soften the edges a bit, and bring that compassion that I know so well, to the fore.

And that my dear friends, is why this week’s Cape Crawl is published late. It would seem that our nation has realized: make your vote count. The queues were long. The sun was hot. And the scanning devises used to scan voters, were clearly designed by a Gen Xer with limited knowledge of how to make technology work, or a Tenderpreneur who was awarded a tender to supply these devises and had no idea how to make them. By late evening voting stations were told to abandon these scanners and run a manual system to move the queues along. And so, they did, as we conquer this modern technology world, one pencil line at a time.