Other social ills the ANCYL could clos-er after Twitter

Their intentions may well be scarily misguided, and they certainly have a lesser chance of pulling it off than Province players stopping a rampaging Willem Alberts, but would an ANC Youth League clos-er of the Twitter really be such a bad thing?

Let me own up early doors to being a member/user/Twit of the ubiquitous social “networking” site. This I am going to interpret as giving me the leg to stand on in commenting on just what a vacuous waste of space it is. There are many valid criticisms of Facebook. Too often the postings, pictures and media added into the site by the users add no value except to highlight the depth of their vanity, emptiness and interminable need to project a life that is cool happy/hip/fulfilled. There is also no small amount of empty pseudo wise quotes, posts and outright “validate me” type braggadocio.

Twitter seems to have taken all of these bad traits and lumped them together in an easier-to-manage format for the intellectually challenged “followers” (apt description of its users, that) to satisfy their need to be attended to and to attend to those whose (often accidental) celebrity provides a useful compass point for their existence. A bit like ramblings from a certain militant youth wing of a former liberation movement really. So I certainly cannot say I would miss it if it shut down. The PigSpotter updates maybe, but if one has to get back to good old vigilance and patience as the tools to survive Gauteng roads, so be it. Be it via a decree from chief rival in the vainglorious Kiddie Amin [(c) David Bullard] or his sidekick, Darth Floyd, Twitter, can go, as far as this writer is concerned.

But since the youth league clearly believes it has the power and authority to effect a clos-er (their word, not mine) of a global institution used by millions, how about they use that power for something that could actually be appreciated by people. The obvious downside of closing Twitter is that it runs the risk of having its addicts turn their attentions where they are most certainly not welcome, like say, the portion of humanity that is not interested in how Moby likes to prepare his organic sustainable no-midgets-were-enslaved-in-the-making-of-this-blob-tofu.

Like sorting out home affairs, getting Pitso Mosimane to explain why Teko Modise has now become a specialist international footballer, vanity plates, robots that stop working at the slightest hint of cloudy skies, the overvalued/undervalued/only reflecting global economic realities rand, the on-again, off-again roadworks on the N1. Add to that the JMPD, which seems to have chucked the by-law enforcement part of their mandate as one would a used prophylactic post-illicit-coitus. Surely if the youth league feels it is such a serious organisation as to be above all parody, and it has such authority, these are the least of the matters it should be attending to?

Or would that go against that pervasive South African custom of worrying and raging about all the wrong things?