Conspiracy Theory

These things fascinate me - the "what ifs" that some folk come up with to explain things you probably never even thought of.

My favourite is still this one - the Road Sign Conspiracy. I tested it out on a trip from Paarl to Somerset West once, and - if you use your imagination - it works! Nearly crashed laughing at that one.

Trawling the headlines on my Reader this morning and being bombarded by bad news, I was struck by a sudden random thought. We all know prices are going up and up the world over. Petrol/diesel, food, interest rates, electricty, you name it. And here's where my conspiracy-theory brain cell kicks in.

Those most affected by all this are not the rich. I stood behind a lady in the checkout queue recently who happily plonked down over a thousand bucks on a variety of luxury groceries that barely filled half a trolley - while I stood counting my cents and hoping to cover 4 essential items behind her. The well-off don't particularly notice a 61c per litre rise in petrol prices for their luxury cars. They still race around as randomly as usual, sip expensive coffees mid-morning in the mall, and carry designer-branded shopping bags laden with treats back home thereafter. If Eskom shoots the prices of electricity higher, it simply gets paid as one of the bills - and the security lights, decorative garden lighting etc stay burning. Ditto on everything else - some folk seem to have an endless supply of ready cash and not feel a thing.

On the other end of the scale are the guys I see sitting around hoping for jobs every morning at the side of the road. The old aunties turning up with their wedding rings at Cash Crusaders to eke out a few Rands from the exchange. The truck-loads of farm workers scattered throughout the commute crammed in like sardines, and the lady who cleans the offices who lost everything when her shack burnt down. These folk are the ones hit the hardest by price hikes, especially for basics like food and power (though it's been mentioned that many of the poor rely on paraffin, not electricity - so all the scheming of Eskom to get the rich to subsidize the poor is really a moot point).

Anyway, back to the conspiracy thing.

North of us, the Zimbabwean bloke in charge has been starving and beating his population into an ever-shrinking group. It's not the fat cats that die of hunger, it's the little people. Here in South Africa, it's the workers who are marching against food price hikes, not the company executives and government officials.

And of course, the more little people you kill off, the more there is left for the important people.

See where I'm going with this random conspiracy theory?

It's all a ploy to rid the world of the poor, so the rich can prosper! :-)

Of course - the poor are the ones working the land, producing the food, doing the unskilled labour that keeps the economy ticking over. So if my theory (albeit wild, way-out and totally inaccurate) is anywhere near correct, the important people are going to run into some very big problems a couple of decades down the line, and have to get their soft hands dirty!

Thus ends your completely wacky thought of the day. Back to regular, more intelligent programming.