There is a reason we are called consumers. My brain removes a special sheet of list paper every month and takes the special list ball point pen from the drawer for ‘listing all the nice things we can buy’. Like the bachelor on a dating reality show during the session finale, my brain metaphorically lines up all the nice things on my list and makes them do tricks to see which one is worthy of my money. Like gravity, I have money they have nice things, therefore I have to buy their nice things.
Sometimes they even have to fight to the death. The new DVD puts up a tough fight and usually beats down an new book more often than not but struggles to stomp out the champion on a consistent basis which is a new video game, with CDs and clothes cowering in the corner of the arena.
Did I get carried away there? I bet I’m not the only one. When I get carried away I am almost always carried to a shopping centre, which brings me to my point. I wonder what eMalahleni looked like if we where as excited to go out and buy food utilities, and pay our taxes and water accounts as if we are to go to the mall. If we went to a shopping centre and spent four hours there every month picking out our water, trying on our electricity, and sometimes coming back to get our money back even public services like to police and public health care have a spot in this shopping centre next to all the other shops that you would normally find in a mall.
The sanitation department has a display in the middle of the mall to show off their new uniforms. If you can manage to imagine that, then good for you because it looks ridiculous in my mind.
I struggle to get excited to pay for things I need because being ‘consumers’ we expect to get what we pay for which is not a bad thing, it is fair. If we are happy with something we will buy it more often. The problem is we are not consumers. We are people and we have ideas and emotions, and hopes and fears. Sometimes I think the people trying to sell me a DVD understand that better than the people providing me with vital resources to carry on living like water and sanitation, and even protection and healthcare.
Some of our hospitals and even many of our SAPS officers see us as consumers. If they give us something, we will be filled like vacuum cleaners.
I don’t want to be a consumer. I want the people I am forced to trust with my safety and health to listen like really take it in. I mean does a vacuum cleaner make choices by letting the consumable product metaphorically fight to the death? I think not, although if they did vacuum cleaners would be really scary.
