Let them wear blue

"Ostrich palaces" was how my mom described some of the houses in Rondebosch when we first moved to Cape Town. I don't think I ever understood the historical reference she was making, but I understood the meaning. Palatial residences, with gardens that opened from the narrow streets into impeccably manicured miniature landscapes--sometimes I could smell the lavender when I walked past. (The house on the corner of Bonair Road actually has a little tower.) My parents bought one of the smaller properties, on which one of the younger, less ostentatious houses, cowers still in the shadow of the three-storey Xanadu behind it.

A few years ago, the crime-concerned residents of Rondebosch decided now was the time to Mobilize. I always enjoy a good mobilization of the middle-classes, they do it so earnestly. There was a growing anxiety about the rising rates of home break-ins, theft out of cars, general resistance to the carefully structured safety of the neighbourhood. The answer, my parents were informed over email and post-box pamphlet, was to install cameras at the main thoroughfares in and out of Rondebosch, and to "stop the criminals before they commit the crime."

My mom had logistical concerns, ofcourse; who was to monitor these cameras, where were they to be installed, given that there are numerous roads into and out of the so-called Golden Mile. Her primary concern, however, was more principled.
"What exactly does it mean," she asked, when she was phoned about supporting the venture financially, and I'm paraphrasing here, "to stop the criminals before they commit the crime? How would one identify these soon-to-be criminals?"
The unfortunate man on the other side of the phone mumbled out an unsatisfactory response.
My mom's spidey-sense began to tingle. Her tone, I imagine, as I retell the story to myself, grew definitively, clinically, cold.
She repeated her question: "What, exactly, do these criminals look like?"
The answer she received was something along the lines of: "they look like they don't live here."
AH HAH! Her spidey-sense was vindicated. In the leafy green suburb of Rondebosch, the blue of the sky is complemented quietly by the the white of the houses and the orange tinge of the bricked pathways around Keurboom Park. Here, there is no black.

My mom declined to participate in the camera scheme. My dad had long since been lamenting the "undercover racism" he detected in the weekly neighbourhood watch emails, and now they had good reason to ignore further correspondence from their security-conscious neighbours (my parents have yet to install burglar bars in their home; they don't believe that living in fear is any way to live in this country).

And pause.

Mahatma Gandhi made an interesting observation many years ago. He is claimed to have said something to the effect of: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians".

And resume.

The people who live in Rondebosch vote, overwhelmingly, for the Democratic Alliance. They are the Christians I do not like. There are some inconsistencies with, and some troubling moments in, DA policy. There are some individuals in the party with whom I'd rather not have dinner. But their role as the opposition is a valuable one, and they have not been useless in delivering the kinds of services they should. The DA, as a party, offends me no more or no less than the ANC. I like the DA, or rather, I don't dislike them. But I do not, and cannot support their supporters. I do not want to align myself with the party my parents' neighbours do.

Maybe it's short-sighted of me, maybe it's unfair. But DA party rhetoric, and increasingly that of the white liberal media, is making me more and more weary of calling myself a "white liberal" and voting as such. So unlike Ramphele and Breytenbach, I won't be buying myself a bright blue Tshirt.

Although, if someone were to pass me a red beret, I dunno, I might just pop it in my backpack for safekeeping.