Spend enough time scrolling and you’ll soon be informed that SA is doomed.
Corruption, crime, economic anxiety and political theatre parade endlessly across our screens.
Apparently, our rainbow days are behind us and despair is the only sensible response.
Perhaps that’s because outrage is profitable.
Fear keeps us clicking and algorithms have no interest in perspective.
They excel at measuring what alarms us and are remarkably poor at measuring what holds us together.
And what holds us together rarely makes the news.
Over the weekend, I watched a video of a man at a petrol station asking the attendant to choose a number between one and 1,000.
The attendant picked 800.
When the driver handed him R800 in cash, the attendant looked bewildered.
“Are you serious?” he asked, over and over again, reluctant to believe that a stranger could simply decide to brighten his day.
Then there was the homeless woman in Johannesburg.
Gap-toothed, weathered by life and surviving from hand to mouth, she is known for reciting poetry to passers-by.
When a motorist mentioned that he didn’t have enough money for parking, she reached into her pocket and handed over her last few coins.
Not because she had plenty, but because somebody needed help.
Last week, my best friend forgot her wallet while buying groceries.
Faced with a trolley full of food and growing embarrassment, she explained the situation to the cashier.
“We mos know each other," the woman said matter-of-factly, reaching into her own handbag and paying the R400 bill.
“Just pay me back next time you’re in town.”
Nobody held a media briefing afterwards, as there was no politician to claim credit.
No economist adjusted a forecast, and the two women went their own ways quietly, without a fuss.
Yet, I’d argue that those moments tell us far more about SA than many of the stories competing for our attention.
Countries are not held together by slogans, manifestos or social media arguments.
They are held together by trust, relationships and millions of ordinary people who know somebody else’s burden matters.
SA has problems. Serious ones. It always has.
But I refuse to believe that the soul of a nation is revealed by its loudest voices or its bleakest headlines.
Because I know another SA.
I know the SA that dances in supermarket aisles, lends neighbours a cup of sugar, chats to strangers in queues and turns a braai into an occasion.
I know the SA that rallies around a family after a tragedy, delivers meals to the sick, collects blankets in winter and still believes that a visitor should never leave hungry.
A country is not its headlines.
It is the sum of countless ordinary encounters that rarely make the front page.
Goodness has never been terribly interested in publicity.
It just gets on with things, because it’s not driven by profit or politics.
Long after the agitators, doomsayers, politicians, international puppetmasters and local skelms have blown away from our continent, like so much sand after a storm, we will continue to be who we are: the embodiment of ubuntu.
And you will not break us.
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