Heritage Day. Where South Africans quit bitching and moaning about the country, death and taxes to rub their Rands together and partake in the nation's favourite pass-time.

Braai.

Where we unite around a fire to drink, burn meat and bitch and moan about taxes, death and the country.

Clad in springbok rugby jerseys and downing black label, Heritage Day asserts the 'different but the same' idea. Which is nice if not limiting by what standard it sets as a unifying activity.

Before dismissing me as a contrarian berk, allow me to acknowledge that my ire is purely a product of social discomfort. I never know what to say while watching the flames and no one wants to talk about anything other than death, the country and taxes.

Have less and less effect. If they are engaged with at all, it's with platitudes and throw away lines like:

Which I can respect though fail to enjoy from a conversational angle.

If anything, it's better than, for example, collectively ululating over South Africa taking Israel to court for genocide back in 2023, while still selling them coal all the way to this day. But hey, the white people ululated too, and we all said ubuntu and hallelujah and no one laughed, not a single person, save for the Israelis probably. But it would have been a bitter laugh as they realized their not-as-pretty Instagram models and billion-dollar propaganda industry was for nothing. It proved that they didn't need to try and convince the world that what they are doing was righteous all they had to do was do it and endure strongly worded appeals to humanity, mean-spirited memes and a lawsuit or two. #resist

Of course, every sane person objects to genocide but our outrage yields little more than a way to discriminate whose company we keep, busying ourselves with liking and sharing anti-Zionist content on social media platforms to #raiseawareness. But awareness goes two ways and while we may have changed some minds, the real achievement was informing Palantir on whose heads they'll need to explode with a suicide drone or microwave laser, or whatever other dystopian— I mean super cool sci-fi, tech they deploy in the name of securing corporate interests.

Reality is and always will be that well-articulated arguments are pointless in the face of a system that views you at best as cattle to be subjugated and at worst obstacles to be annihilated. Which also, funnily enough, doesn't make for good fire-side conversation.

But before some poes from Stellenbosch declared Braai Day, Braai Day; it was, in fact, Heritage Day. And before that, King Shaka Day. What once united us, the whites—on the right side of history— too, was that of violent resistance in the face of tyranny. So, while we cheer for Nepal and what few Palestinians remain, dutifully shaking our heads at America and making light of a patsy getting his neck blown out, our own country rots under the weight of a collective beer boep of social division, political confusion and the inaction it yields.

We're defanged or at best, confused. The enemy is no longer red coats or boers, it's the decentralized systems of control wielded over us by tech oligarchs and their generals: champions and enforcers of the status quo.

And talking about it is great if you want to sound intelligent but make sure to flip the vleis before it burns and keep your guests well lubricated, enough to endure self-righteous conversations about what should be done and how to do it, before gulping down your carcinogens and thinking about death, taxes and a country we have no interest in improving.

Militant refusal to be oppressed may be a part of our heritage, but we no longer embody it. We've grown fat and stupid while the rands we rub together to keep distracting ourselves turn to cents.

And while the world happens, we'll be burning coal and wrapping ourselves in whichever country's flag our forefathers or forefathers before them may have come from while living no differently from anyone else in our economic class. Whatever colourful history you may be entitled to claim a part of your reality is likely that of jaundiced eyes bulging from the excitement of begging players on a screen to score a try, while a relative burns boerewors distracted by sport betting and their own dishevelment. And a wife or lover who hides in the kitchen, making repulsive potato salad, and yearning for a man thought up in her dreams.

A calibre of which that likely no longer exists.