It can be tempting in times like these to give up, to surrender to creeping entropy. There is, after all, a certain measure of comfort in surrender. The perverse need to give up grows as the adversity you’re facing reaches greater and greater heights – to give up your value system, your dreams and hopes, your ideas for a better world; to give up the fight to be better every day, for the rest of your life.
The adversity you’re facing draws its awesome power from stupidity and ugliness; it is corrupt to its core and will not rest until it sees you on your knees, part of the process, defeated at a very fundamental level. It wants to see you humiliated, impoverished, accepting of its warped morals and pseudo-intellectual constructs.
Yes, faced with odds as big as these, the average citizen of a troubled South Africa in late summer ’08 is sorely tempted to give up. Or, even worse, just leave.
But that is an average citizen I’m talking about. Not you. You’re a maverick. Giving up is not an option, here or anywhere, any time. You know who you are, and you know what you value in life. You understand that selling your principles is a sacrifice that will leave you scarred for the rest of your life, a price that is too much to pay for a human being of your integrity and brains.
Think about this when entropy starts banging at the gates of your being. Your uniqueness is an affront to it; your clear thought unbearable to the force of chaos, your system of values an antidote to its corrosiveness. Deep within you remains your greatest treasure: your restless, ever-wandering soul. No matter how difficult the times, the true maverick’s soul will never be for sale. At any price.
By Branko Brkic, editor of Maverick
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