Have a nice day!

WE FLING these four words about like they were just so much confetti at someone else’s wedding.

Yet they are four words that can cut deeper than a Samurai blade and be as deadly as a 9mm right between the eyes.

Everyone sips a little from the cup of melancholy around this time of year. Even those with the bullet-proof constitutions, or those with the firmest of faiths; those invulnerable to “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” thanks to their impregnable skepticism (the ones who always tick the “Who cares?” column in web polls) or those so pissed on their own power and prestige they’d probably survive a nuclear holocaust (along with the cockroaches) — even they get the teensiest twinge of sadness this time of the year.

And the wicked curse of life is that it is precisely those sorts who fling, “Have a nice day!” about with casual abandon.

They would never say it in a refugee camp to a child dying of disease. They’d never pop their cheery cheeks through the single doorway of a child-headed household in Botshabelo and say: “Have a nice day!” like it was a memo from management.

And yet there are those who, through blind ignorance, through rhino-skinned insensitivity impervious to the havoc of their incompetence, who have become unwitting carriers of this virus.

Maybe some are just like drug-mules: too dumb, too gullible and too naive to notice the pain and suffering they cause. We all know some like that.

Then there are those who are so warped by their sense of self-importance and twisted by the power that they wield that they genuinely believe that not having a nice day is tantamount to treason, cause for dismissal or shows that you’re not a “team player”.

To the more than 10-million South Africans who suffer as I do to a greater or lesser extent through no fault of our own, these flippant unmeant tag lines only rub salt into the wounds of our inadequacies, shame, guilt, sorrow, impotence, rage, our sense of being damaged goods and their ubiquitous mental anguish. And we are the ones to have to make exceptions for your hypocrisy!

We get fobbed off with phrases such as “Snap out of it!” Jawohl! Right away, ma’am.

“Don’t play the victim here!” I’m sorry. I’ll go be sick over there. Is that okay?

“Stop feeling so sorry for yourself!” How thoughtless of me. I’ll move out of your sunlight.

The stigma South Africans in the 21st century still attach to the hundreds of disorders lumped under the convenient label of “mental illnesses” remains one of the worst indictments on our society. And stigmatising others, forcing them to lash out in rage or because they knew the “normal channels” would not work, becomes the comfy camouflage for those who walk among and over us, oblivious to just how sick they are themselves.

It’s true that sticks and stones and sidewalks and being hit by a car will break our bones, whether you were drunk or sober as a judge. But it’s the words … those cutting, scourging, callous, cruel words that will kill. As sure as if you pulled the trigger yourself.

Remember that this time of year. And should you say nice things, for God’s sake — and ours’ — mean them. Or else shut up.