Literary Lion Challenge: Edge

i stumbled upon a piece of a blog called Literary Lion, [who i believe to be Laura Gabrielle Feasey who you can find on the Twitterer as @laurafeasey], in which there lay a challenge to write a 400 word or less piece titled ‘Edge’ and in the absence of regular Tandem Blog posting, i decided to take up that challenge and so here is mine, i hope you will enjoy, or something:

EDGE

David woke up with an impressive jolt.

He’d had that dream again. The one where he was the guitarist that Bono had picked to be in his world famous rock band. You know, U2. Yes, THAT U2. Except that he hadn’t been picked, had he? Because his name was not “out there” or cool like ‘The Edge’. His name was David.

Big world-travelling hit-producing rock bands didn’t choose people named David as their guitarist. They chose someone who people would not make complete eye contact with, who you would half-smile and nod to as he entered the room and quietly made space for him to pass by. They chose someone called ‘The Edge’.

“I could have been The Edge”, thought David, whose last name was Evans. David Evans. You don’t see people getting excited about screaming that name into an announcer’s microphone as a legendary quartet set the stadium on fire. Metaphorically, that is. They didn’t actually set the stadium on fire. Although with U2, who knew what they might try? David Evans clearly didn’t. Because he was lumbered with that sad, ridiculous name?

What if he’d told them that his middle name was ‘Howell’? That was slightly interesting, wasn’t it? I mean, not by itself, but maybe snuck in between the two most boringest names he could think of, maybe ‘Howell’ was just what was needed to have helped him force entry into the band?

David Howell Evans. He whispered it again. As he finally climbed his way out of bed and started getting dressed.

David. Howell. Evans. He liked the sound of that. If he had applied to be a member of the group that would Wow the world with ‘Boy’, by giving them his whole name like that, maybe it would have been he who was synonymous with not being able to find that thing you had misplaced on a badly signposted road somewhere on a clot-ridden Sunday afternoon?

David Howell Evans pulled on his jacket even as his face continued to shout to anyone who might have been vaguely interested that he was sulking. Pouting, even. That could all have been his!

Yet here he was, stuck in a hotel room somewhere in the middle of who knows where, doing he couldn’t for the moment remember what.

David looked up and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. “Oh, right!” he exclaimed out loud.

i hope you enjoyed reading that – make sure you check out the home page for Literary Lion and all the other entries for this challenge… and maybe consider writing one yourself…

10 Practical Ways you can get involved with bridge-building

So much good stuff happening all over the internet the last two weeks in terms of helping us understand some of the challenges we are facing.

i stumbled upon this in the Warehouse’s most recent newsletter and wanted to share it with you as some really practical steps for moving forwards together. These steps apparently emerged from a conversation between Linda Martindale, Caroline Powell and my wife, tbV [the beautiful Val]. We have heard a lot about Reconciliation [making relationships right] but not nearly enough about Restitution [making situations/contexts right] so this feels really helpful.

The Bully in the Mirror

A wise teacher once told the story of a man who was on a journey, who was mugged and beaten up, robbed of all his possessions and left on the side of the street to die.

A Frikkin Hashtag round 2: And Then The World Ended

Last week was the second official week of the South African presence on the International Trending Hashtagging game app under the hashtag @AFrikkinHashtag [Say it out loud].

Despite it happening right in the middle of all the #FeesMustFall action, we still somehow managed to briefly trend in South Africa for the first time while also trending solidly at number 4 in the States.

Morocco- I was wrong. [Glimpse into the story of a Christian moving to a Muslim country]

My Facebook friend Mandy asked if she could share a post about her recent journey into Morocco…

How to be an Ally: Just say “No!”

This week i was hanging out with my friend Susan and she told me a story that happened recently about standing up to racism.

Some Pictures to help you Walk through #FeesMustFall

There have been a lot of words written this last week with regards to #FeesMustFall and it can be quite overwhelming to try and wade through them all.

Sometimes pictures can speak louder than words, so here is a post with some of the better pictures i have found that help to put this past week and some of the related issues into some kind of perspective.

Firstly the Ant vs Cricket scenario we witnessed so effectively in ‘A Bug’s Life’ – how less than 25% of this country managed to keep 75% or so of it in bondage for so long was always going to be a just-a-matter-of-time scenario.

This cartoon i feel sums up much of the white population in South Africa. i don’t know many people who drive past the township on the way to the airport and don’t think it would be great if all those people had better living conditions and a more comfortable way of life. But the moment it looks like i might have to give up some of my comfort or ease-of-life or money, resources or time, it can quickly become a whole different story…

This piece by Iain Thomas was shared across Facebook and i think puts into good words a lot of the sadness that many of us carry with some of the actions and responses [or lack of action and response] we have seen from various people and organisations this last week while #FeesMustFall was happening…

The punchline of this is ‘Most Importantly Africa needs leadership’ which sums up so much of our present condition and obstacles i feel. As does the one statement i heard this past week which went: South Africa doesn’t have a money problem – South Africa has a money management problem’ – i cannot get my head around the numbers i saw posted about Zuma’s cabinet and some of the stats of what they earn and the houses and cars they have that tbV shared with me last night and how that has been allowed so easily to be a thing. Right there there are millions of rands that could be doing good.

But the other statements on this poster help give an eyesight into more of the White Privilege we have been talking about:

This is a repost of one of the more powerful posters i saw which we saw play out in reality this past week which was incredible:

And finally this cartoon which i just realised i only posted the first four blocks of in one of my previous posts as i assumed the whole thing came together, which must have confused a whole lot of people, but having the whole cartoon will help give a comparative insight into how privilege can play out in two different life trajectories…

Above all else, and thanks to Wayne Eaves for this one, take time to LISTEN, to do some RESEARCH, to really try and UNDERSTAND and if you do there will be so many people more than happy to engage with you and hep you to ‘get’ this thing. But above all else, try and not be one of these:

[If you are someone looking for more of the words from last week, there are some excellent links here]