We hate refugees. We burn them out of their homes. We chase them away. We burn down their businesses. We tell them go back to where you came from. Bloody refugees. We really don’t like them.

So when Helen Zille comes here and tells us that kids from the Eastern Cape are refugees, we get upset. Yes, they are poor. Yes, they can’t get an education in Eastern Cape. Yes, they would prefer to go to school near their homes rather than cross into another province to get an education. Yes, they have no choice. But why call them refugees? They are not dirty like those Zimbabweans or those bloody Congolese. They are not dodgy like Nigerians or scheming like those no-good Somalis. They are South Africans, just like us.

Helen Zille, take your 30 schools and shove them up your backside, we won’t go to a school that compares us to those scumbags from across the border. You can’t call our children “refugees”.

What I wrote above is bullshit. Bullshit semantics.

Semantics allow us to find a thousand meanings in a word. It allows me to extract a bullshit line of thinking from just one word. It allows me to insinuate that you hate the word “refugee” because you hate refugees. It allows the ANC to infer that Helen Zille is a throwback to apartheid. It allows a whole bunch of people to get on their high horses.

Because, at the end of the day, words are always so much easier to deal with than problems. And really, that is what we have got here – a problem. Education in the Eastern Cape is rubbish. So rubbish, kids have to go to another province to be educated. That is a problem.

But we would rather cloud the problem in bullshit semantics. Oh well. I guess if we look on the bright side, the kids in the Eastern Cape won’t be doing this. You need an education first.

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  • David Smith is a world famous artist and a British Olympic hammer thrower. He is a curler for Scotland and Manitoba. A pro wrestler fondly known as the British Bulldog. A Canadian economist and a Mormon missionary they call the Sweet Singer of Israel. He is a British historian and a bishop. David Smith is the biographer of HG Wells, a professor of physics, a composer and a music teacher at Yale. He played rugby for Samoa, England and New Zealand. He created the Melissa worm, a deadly computer virus. He is the Guardian's man in Africa, he starred in a reality TV show and shot his way to silver in the 600m military rifle prone position at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. But this isn't that David Smith. This is the blog of the other David Smith. David J Smith. The one from Durban by the Sea. The one who lives in Amsterdam. Yes, him. The David Smith who likes to write about himself in the third person. To learn about all the other David Smiths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Smith To contact this David Smith: [email protected]

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David J Smith

David Smith is a world famous artist and a British Olympic hammer thrower. He is a curler for Scotland and Manitoba. A pro wrestler fondly known as the British Bulldog. A Canadian economist and a Mormon...

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