Losers and Windbreakers
Small wonder for us pessimists that the “Founding Father” is still at it, deciding when we shall know about OUR future. It brings me back to my favourite question about our post-independence democracy dalliance: “why hold elections if losers claim to be winners?” “Because losers don’t care about the result, stupid!” Remember that old truism: “finders keepers, losers weepers?” Perhaps we typically fit the bill. Perhaps that makes us losers of the American kind. But as the old tale goes concerning our lot as once told by that not-so-esoteric spin guy whom cartoonists believe has more scalp than hair, Poof Moyo, we are a peace loving lot therefore we are not very much likely to take up any kind of arms to protest against anything. Even when someone breaks wind in a crowded banking hall, we all suffer silently, and the very fact that one decides to break wind in that crowded banking hall depicts us a people with no sense of shame whatsoever. So a windbreaker of the political kind gets off lightly because, well, we tolerate all kind of nonsense! And like that banking hall dolt, the politically-challenged windbreaker has no shame whatsoever. But then, if you take up arms in post-independence Zimbabwe, what other limbs are you left with? And then the soldier laid down his arms. Catch my drift? Though what is happening in Zimbabwe is not funny anymore, you still find people laughing. Only it ain’t the zany type no more! “You will laugh alone” goes the ghetto parlance. You laugh not because you find it amusing, but because you wonder what kind of species we have become. It is the cynical laugh that says, I don’t believe this. It is stuff that that would have you raving mad: incredible prices of basics and ridiculous wages for starters. One has to listen to the anger in the streets to get a feel of why nothing has happened since the 90s when this rot set in. Some believed it started much earlier, when Ndabaningi was ousted from the party he formed, perhaps? The guy with a funny “mouth-do” has juju, I heard someone say the other day. Surreptitiously I exclaimed “oh my God.” If we are to reduce this suffering to this, then there is nothing we can do until some malevolent god makes a grand appearance. But one thing I know for sure is that I detest windbreakers of any kind, because, as common understanding would have it, they have dead consciences.