One of the truisms in teaching is that students will tend to meet a teacher’s expectations. If the teacher feels the student is a loser, then the odds are the student will be a loser in class. Or consider the idea of a coach that can take a team of average folks and create a winning season. What a society sees for itself is often what it gets. If it is optimistic, its members are likely to make that optimism a reality. If the society is pessimistic, then the life can be drained from the society and it can degenerate – again to meet its predisposition.
Turning Point is the personal story of how one member faced being a member of a society that had lost its hope and optimism for the future.
One of the most common questions I’ve ever been asked was: â€What made you decide to emigrate?â€
The United States faces an immigrant problem. It is one of the dilemmas of the age. On the one hand, many of its citizens are very vocal in how bad it is and how it is degenerating into something evil. On the other hand is this pressure from citizens of nearly every other country on the planet to emigrate or at least to visit to partake of its educational opportunities or other benefits. It seems that some of the more angry and bitter and negative US Citizens are missing something. Kim du Toit experienced a gestalt that opened his eyes and prompted his emigration from South Africa to the US.
One often hears, or reads the expression, time stood still. Well, it did for me right then, as I, sitting in my warm, comfortable executive car, the heater warm and the radio playing soft, late-night music, saw this little boy, shivering in the cold, forced to work at an appalling hour of night, for almost no money, patiently waiting for the Boss to make up his mind which f** newspaper he was going to buy. …
That’s why I left: I could see no solution, and I could see no future for the country, or myself, that did not involve hardship, hatred, danger or death.
There are no more newspaper boys in Johannesburg anymore. It’s not because eight-year-old Black kids’ parents have suddenly become wealthier by the ending of apartheid: it’s because newspaper boys would now be killed for the few coins they carry in their pockets.
It is perhaps the most difficult challenge of all for a country. The mechanics of governance and administration are one thing, a spirit of success and optimism is another. Much of corruption and degeneration in a country’s society comes out of despair for the future. Everything is going down the tubes so the only way to survive is on one’s own, no matter how it is done. This is an escalating system that leads down to a country that is no more than small groups fighting each other for whatever they can get. The benefits of a country wide infrastructure is lost.
Much of Africa since the colonial empires departed provide examples that show a contrast by what was lost along with the imperial westerners. It is this example that contributes to the racist view that these people in Africa just can’t hack it. That is the same racist view that is often used to condemn the Iraqis and rationalize abandoning the efforts to help those people rise from tribalism and corruption. That racism is a pessimistic outlook for a bleak future. If it prevails, it may well be self fulfilling.
It is the attitude that the US brings to the table, the optimism that has shown results to envy, that is its most valuable contribution to worldwide society. US government policy has been on-again, off-again about trying to infect others with this attitude. A few years ago we started another on-again view and it is now undergoing significant debate. Changing attitudes is not switch flipping and vacillation confuses the message. Fortunately, the existence of the vitality and enthusiasm and vigor of individual US citizens will provide a base that the rest of the world will and does notice. That base may be under attack but it will take a long time to turn it around and that provides time to see what the country is doing to itself before the damage becomes too severe.
Anticipation of failure can be a disease. Confidence in each other and the future may be hard to find but is the fundamental requirement of better conditions for everyone.