I watched Tsotsi last night. Like most good works of entertainment (or some might say art), it drew self-reflection.
I would move to a South African township.
I would live in a shack with a tin roof.
I do not think that I would enter as an agent of change, to impose Western ideals. I would come to learn. But I would still be wrong to be there.
Because I would be having the time of my life.
Why live in a South African township? To experience the oppression, witness the squalor, understand the injustice and my role in it. And I would be electric with emotion. I would feel alive, which is hard to do in a house in the suburbs, or a coffee shop on a corner in San Fransisco.
Even if I experienced immense pain, it would be in sympathy for the pain of others, it would not be my own pain. I would drink it in, revel in the "life experience". Then, I could brush that pain aside, very easily.
I would leave the township.
I could never exist there without knowing this is not my future. I cannot act in this world without the burden and the freedom of privilege. I am an international agent, skipping from continent to continent, acquiring and consuming the knowledge of life, while those in the township look at the days ahead and the township stretches before them.
And besides the pain of living, I would enjoy the weather, play in the ocean, eat and drink the new, befriend the foreign.
I would better myself.
All this at the expense of others.
Broadening my world view.
I know the arguments. I recognize the irrationality. And I am paralyzed by the futility, filled with loathing I cannot articulate.
