Passive Aggression and the Cape Town Douche

If Cape Town drivers were just open about their dickness, it would be better. If the bimbo were to brazenly flip you the bird while cutting you off, you could at least yell and curse AT her, rather than towards her retreating back. Instead, she pretends like she doesn't see you as she forces you off the road and through a playground of preschoolers. She is distracted. By her cell phone. Which is also illegal. But how was she to know?

"Who's gonna pay to get this powder-paint off my windshield?"

Cape Town has got to be the drama-queen capitol of SA. It also has, by far and large, the worst drivers in the Southen Hemisphere, a fact that is indubitably linked to the prior.

Sometimes, it feels like I’m living in the world’s biggest girls-only high-school. Someone always has a problem with someone else – someone has always said the wrong thing, spoken to the wrong person, worn the wrong shoes with the wrong pants or boned the wrong ex on the dance floor of Tin Roof. And the condemnations are always so vehement, so pointed and, often time, so face-slappingly biased that the implication that you even slightly empathise with the pouting whiner is enough to make you want to stomp off and whine about it to someone else, then come back and stab the offending douche in the eye with a fork, because they so vehemently and so pointedly complained so quietly.

Let me settle this now. It is your fault. All of you. Every single person to whom the passive aggressive game of pretend-friends has become second nature. If you don’t like someone, don’t be friends with them. It’s ok. Your world will not crumble if you are not everyone’s bosom buddy. Real life is not like Facebook. No-one is going to get into a competition with you over who has the most BBM contacts. And if anyone does, Fuck ’em. If you don’t like the way someone behaves, don’t invite them to your party and then bitch about what a bitch they were to your “friends” later. Because, big surprise, like attracts like, and I can guarantee you that any high-pitched, nasal whining you do will be secretly reciprocated later.

But why should anyone accept this sort of responsibility when it is so obviously not their fault? It’s the kitchen, the room-mate, the best-friend’s boyfriend, the best friend, for that matter, mom, dad, the traffic cops, the guy who shat in your kit-bag seven years ago in high school. Well guess what: it’s not. Everything on that list is a symptom of the same cyclical problem. So long as people are acting this way, it is everyone’s fault. Everyone who posts a “You know who you are” status on Facebook or refuses to wash the one pot that, during its time by the sink, has irrefutably proven Darwin’s theory of evolution, just because you weren’t the one who gunked it up in the first place; anyone who, in anyway, has partaken of the age-old game of Let’s Keep Quiet and See Who Explodes First, is responsible for the vague cloud of shittiness that hangs over this fair city and, in small ways every day, makes everyone’s day a little worse.

Cape Town is a fantastic city, and I would never live anywhere else, but many of the locals seem to live in a state of perpetual deferred responsibility. Everyone is carrying a little bit of someone else’s baggage, and no-one has the balls to turn around and throw it back at the other.

Because that is what this city really needs – some fucking confrontation.

We need more of this.

Polite society, through some monstrous distillation, has turned the majority of people into asshole-cowards – not brave enough to confront an errant co-worker but upset enough to secretly piss in his coffee, so to speak.

Now, I’m not saying go out and punch someone (not openly, at least) but if you feel the need to say something, say it. If you believe you should do something, then take that action. Trust me, you’ll feel better for it. And because of that, you will be less of a dick to the next stranger you encounter on the road. Maybe you won’t cut him off in traffic. Maybe you will, because you’re still angry (or just a dick), but you’ll get to mouth “Fuck You” into your rear-view mirror and the sucker behind you will have a valid target to vent upon – a douche-bag towards whom they can hurl all the quietly boiling, passive-aggressive rage that has been building up over last few days and, in some small way, feel vindicated.

Also, chicks dig scars.