Fashion faux pas

As usual my lunch break buddies and I congregated at the table for our lunch time banter. This is a platform for anything and everything. We have an unspoken rule, "we agree to disagree". Topics are random, and they sometimes leave a person wanting to do something about what was discussed.

Top of our list today was poverty. We wondered aloud about SA, if we would ever win our poverty struggle – and it was unanimously agreed that it definitely is becoming impossible for the country to think of social upliftment when it is busy trying to fit-in in the global stage. We also agreed that as a people we have equally become unfailingly selfish!  From the discussion it sort of dawned on us that we are feeling the effects of globalization. Phew! We are experiencing hard times! We went on and on until it was time to go back to work.

Once alone I thought of our discussion; is globalization really our enemy? “What really does globalization mean to the man in the street?” . I ran straight for the dictionary, and it didn't let me down. The Cambridge International Dictionary defined globalization as; an idea that events in one country cannot be separated from those in another and that a government should consider the effects of its actions in other countries as well as its own. 

Psst! I don't really think there is an actual definition of the word, because most  times when experts explain the concept they associate the word to events. Nonetheless, the dictionary definition made me think. The butterfly effect jumped straight into my mind ... Something I heard and read about somewhere:-) To try and explain this I'll say, the butterfly effect is always associated with chaos. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is described as the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. Good or bad!

So, when I was alone thinking about the discussion I had with my posse, I thought of globalization as a butterfly. The flapping of its wings being the movements of products, ideas, money, people and cultures into the world today. This is supposed to be good but somehow in our shores these movements have managed to widen the socio-economic imbalances.  So to explain our glum lives we can argue that though we have had a history of being poor in this country - created by the legacy of disfranchisement, since globalization became our pop-culture, the plight of the poor has been accelerated to poorer. 

So where do we go from here? Others argue that the remedy is in the poison itself. So if we don't talk about issues how would we identify the ingredients in the recipe that need to be discarded?  Why aren't we talking about this? What happen to social spaces developed during our ‘revolution’ for liberty, equality and fraternity? Have these discourse spaces become a fashion mistake? Should we create new spaces for economic freedom?