There are not too many rules to follow when you are travelling on an aeroplane. You must turn your data off once the plane is about to take off, put your seat back in the upright position, and remove earphones.
This fellow sitting in front of me this week was getting himself cosy for our two-hour flight. The earphones were nestled in both ears – stereo style. The TikTok videos were flipping, and the seat was in full recline mode. He corrected all that on instruction from the attendant, but as soon as she turned away to ‘prepare for take-off’, mister’s earphones were back in, data was streaming TikTok (unless you can download these for later viewing), and the seat back was back in recline mode. I got annoyed and moved a row further away from him.
Johannesburg has serious traffic issues made worse recently by these massive afternoon thundershowers that test every motorist’s patience and skill. This chap in a little hatchback motors past me on the M1 highway at a rapid rate of knots, in the pouring rain, in the emergency lane clearly marked by the yellow line. And even in less dramatic weather conditions, there are too many drivers who believe they don’t have to wait like the rest of us idiots, and they break the law.
I wasn’t there when these rules for air travel and driving on highways were decided, but they make sense and have a reason for being there. Usually it’s about the safety of the public – access for emergency vehicles, hearing the pilot’s instructions, freeing access to escape in case of emergency. Instead, we have that South African idiom: We were not consulted! Or the attitude is that corrupt officials annoy me, and so I am entitled to break the traffic rules and any other law. I’m not sure if these lawbreakers feel a sense of rebelliousness, and that their disregard for rules that the rest of us follow makes them cleverer or more revolutionary.
History is full of contrarians, those people who don’t follow rules, who swim against the tide. But there is more than just being contrary for its own sake that will drive them. To break rules, you have to be clear that they deserve to be broken for the betterment of humanity, or at the very least your community. Martin Luther King says it quite bluntly: ‘One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.’ I am pretty sure the yellow line commuters are not overly concerned about bettering anybody except their arrival times.
I think I would like the person who isn’t being contrarian for its own sake, or because they feel they are entitled more than others. I’m sure they make the most interesting people, and are probably quite courageous in their contrariness. There’s a picture in a Berlin museum that captures the rise of Nazism. All the workers have their arms raised in that infamous salute, except one. The photographer captured this contrarian standing with his arms firmly folded across his chest. That is courage. The consequences could have been dire.
The world needs more of that independence of spirit, not the self-serving attitudes of the ‘we weren’t consulted’ brigade.