Platitudes won’t deliver us from grim reality

Murder and mayhem are up. Child literacy and the rand are down.

Punch-drunk with the burden of being the continual bearer of bad news, the big media houses fall back on the trite and tested. It’s all celebrities and mundanities, calculated to reassure us that life in our abnormal society is proceeding, um, normally.

In the past fortnight, I’ve read no fewer than three articles purporting to be political analyses that, upon reading, turned out to be another lot of exhortations to “optimism”