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Stop sending me petitions!
24/04/2008 13:00 - (SA)
Georgina Guedes
One of my pet peeves is the amount of junk that ends up in my inbox, sent to me by well-meaning but ill-informed friends and colleagues.
In the past couple of months, the thing that has really started to annoy me are the inane web petitions that people think a caring and thoughtful person such as myself would surely want to sign.
Stop Eskom
There's the protesting the Eskom electricity rates being raised by 53%. Granted, I'm not delighted about that either, but I'd quite like the new power plants to be built so that load shedding can stop and manufacturing and mining can contribute fully to the nation's growth again.
It's the next piece of logic in that petition that really makes me start to twitch. Here's what it says:
"The government is prepared to spend R30+ billion on the stadiums for the 2010 World Cup, and a couple million on generators for these stadiums. Wouldn't it make more sense to give the money they are prepared to spend on generators to Eskom instead? Maybe then by 2010 they will be able to generate enough power to supply SA and generators will not be needed."
So, if we give money to Eskom that was supposed to go to World Cup generators, we'll solve the problem? A couple of million? If all it took was a couple of million, do you honestly think that some businessman wouldn't have handed a cheque over to Eskom the day after the first load shedding stopped manufacturing?
Think about it like this, stupid person, my electricity bill comes to around R300 per month (to help me do the maths easily). This means that I am spending around R10 on electricity a day.
Let's not even bother thinking nationally - the population of Johannesburg alone is over three million, living in around one million formal households. If 1 million households pay 50% more for their electricity, that's R5 extra per household per day for Eskom, resulting in a daily yield of R5m. Yes, daily! And that's just Johannesburg.
The maths isn't perfect, but it illustrates the point. Eskom has far more to gain raising our electricity rates than it does from getting a check for "a couple of million" from the World Cup organisers.
The petition completely ignores the fact that new power stations need to be built, at a cost of R300 billion to the country, and ultimately to us, the electricity consumers. While I'm not forgiving Eskom and Government for their appalling mismanagement of the process, we were always going to have to foot the bill for this, whether through taxes, gradual rate hikes over the last ten years, or a surprise 51% increase this year.
Another thing. If I go to a football match, I want to be damn sure that a generator is in place in case of an act of God or sabotage cutting the electricity to the stadium (as incompetent as Eskom management is, I don't think that they would schedule load shedding for the middle of a World Cup match - although anything is possible).
I imagine that generators are standard practice in the case of international sporting events, and I would hate for South Africa to look even more ridiculous than it already does if it overlooks this essential security measure because of pressure from a petition.
The starving dog
And then there's the case of the starving dog. The first time I received this petition request, I didn't even scroll down, as I didn't want to see photos of an animal starving to death. I am an animal lover, and these sorts of things upset me.
The second time I received it, I decided to check it out on Snopes (www.snopes.com - use this to check out any international petitions and emails before forwarding them). There, the pictures loaded before I had a chance to avert my gaze, but the supporting story helped make them a little easier to bear.
If you're the only person in South Africa who hasn't received the petition yet, the story goes like this: In 2007, Colombian artist, Guillermo "Habacuc" Vargas put a starving dog on display at an exhibition in an art gallery.
This is all the information we know for certain. What some people are claiming is that Vargas intentionally starved the dog to death in the exhibit, while passers by looked on dispassionately.
What Vargas said is that he found a near-to-starving dog in the street, took it in, fed it, named it "Natividad", and put it on display in the exhibition for only three hours, to illustrate the point that people looked at it and got upset about it because their attention was called to it because it was "art".
The same dog, walking around in the street outside (and believe me, there are lots of starving, stray dogs in Colombia) would have been ignored and avoided.
What end the dog came to remains uncertain. Vargas and the gallery management claim that it escaped and that was the last they saw of it. The petition creators say that it was starved to death. The Word Society for the Protection of Animals ended up getting involved, and have stated that they don't condone the use of live animals in exhibits, but aren't taking any action against Vargas specifically.
The point of the petition is to prevent Vargas from being allowed to exhibit at the Biennale of 2008, where, it claims, he will repeat the exhibit.
Although we will never know what actually became of Natividad (I suspect she did, in fact, starve to death, but not in the gallery, in the streets, which is what would have happened to her anyway), Vargas has stated that he won't be repeating his starving dog exhibit, and honestly, we have no more reason to believe the animals' rights activists than we do to believe him, so this is a pointless petition.
In its own way, the petition has become an extension of Vargas's artwork - people are willing to get upset about that dog, sign a petition, forward it around the world, but if one in ten of the people who signed that petition have ever contributed money to their local dog shelter, which is probably saving starving animals' lives every day, I'd be very surprised.
Petitions are the lazy man's way of making himself feel better instead of actually making a doing anything. Donate money to animal shelters, turn your geyser off during the day, use energy-efficient lightbulbs - these are actions that will make a positive change.
Don't fill my inbox with unintelligent and pointless petition drivel. I'm honestly not interested.
Georgina Guedes is a South African journalist. Lolcats make her laugh every time.
Send your comments to Georgina Guedes.
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