Tag: culture

  • Where is your humanity?

    Where is your humanity?

    Taking pride in the colour of your skin or ethnicity distracts you from your humanity. Our humanness, our gentleness, our inclination towards kindness – these are all part of our natural state. We lose it when our need to be associated with significance or superiority distracts us from this, and replaces it with the fear…

  • Willingly obliged

    Willingly obliged

    This is most true for religious subscription and cultural heritage, but applies to every relationship in our life. Choice inspires willingness because a choice is driven by our belief in the benefit of our contribution towards others. Obligation inspires contempt because it is most often associated with the threat of a negative repercussion. What drives…

  • You are more than how you look

    You are more than how you look

    Taking pride in the colour of your skin or ethnicity distracts you from your humanity. Our humanness, our gentleness, our inclination towards kindness – these are all part of our natural state. It’s our need to be associated with significance or superiority that distracts us from this, and replaces it with the fear of being…

  • The value of values

    The value of values

    One of the paths to insanity is to try to reason around someone else’s actions or behaviour by assuming that their value system is the same as yours. This includes people who come from the same culture, tradition, ethnicity, and even family as you do. Our value system may be informed by a common framework…

  • Me and my American wife

    Daughter: Daddy, mummy says the sandwiches are about to go into the press Me: Tell mummy it’s not a press, it’s a toaster Mummy: … The difference in terminology between what Americans call things, versus what we say in South Africa is quite amusing at times. My favourite so far has got to be the…

  • Frustration is that feeling you get when you see idiots waging arguments about issues that are distorted by their anger and inbred prejudices and sincerely wanting to correct them, but knowing that any attempt at reasonable discourse will fall on selectively deaf ears inviting nothing but venomous drivel in return.  

  • This is all starting to feel too adult for me. I prefer playing with kids. They usually have no hidden agendas, political motives, or underhanded suspicions. If I imitate them, they’re happy, and if they imitate me, I’m happy, and we give and take without keeping score. All adults know is to be territorial as…

  • That Cultural Thing

    I once heard someone say something along the lines of: If you need government to protect your culture, then your culture is already dead These cultural appropriation-ists should consider this within a broader context.  Whether or not cultural appropriation is true, for me, is a side issue. The real issue is how did it get…