Engagement and inattention

Many people all over the world identified with the struggle in South Africa. The struggle for the rights and human dignity of the majority of South Africans rightly and fortunately attracted passive and active sympathy from people around the world. But once the struggle was no longer sexy, and dissolved into the ambiguity of a post-Apartheid dispensation where crime. corruption, misgovernance and perhaps a national discourse dominated by falsehoods have created (or perpetuated) an unstable, unsafe and unequal society, people have lost interest. (it is an inescapable irony that many of the things white racists predicted would happen in a post apartheid dispensation have) Wellwishers around the globe still cite Mandela as an example of a secular saint, but beyond that feel no responsibilty for what has materialised.

I wonder if the same kind of dynamic is perhaps kicking in with other trendy causes, such as the Palestinian one? Some people may do their best to reshape or replace Israel, in the name of the assertion of Palestinian dignity, and then, if the Jewish homeland is dismembered or so emasculated that it is eventually replaced by another corrupt or fundamentalist or dictatorial Moslem state, people in Scandanavia and San Francisco will shrug their shoulders and turn back to their lives...