A letter to our readers and members
This was supposed to be a celebratory message.
We had plans to record a funny jig once our membership programme, Maverick Insider, reached 10k members — a momentous milestone that we achieved late last week, just as Covid-19 was applying for its national disaster visa. Celebration planning turned to crisis planning and instead we now have to deliver a more grown-up message.
Our news feeds are now flooded with coronavirus stories and we realise it can be overwhelming. As we turn our focus onto the pandemic and its daily effects on our lives, our editorial meetings interrogate this iteration of what it means to be a public service. Balancing the need to keep people informed with avoiding hysteria and panic, and finding ways to use our platform and community network to do good while we report on developments with professionalism and integrity. This sometimes means our Daily Maverick team members are exposed to risks in order to serve — like many other workers and public service officials who have no choice and for whom self-isolation is not feasible or possible.
These are extraordinary times where our primal needs to keep ourselves and our families safe are being triggered by an enemy we can’t see until it’s too late. Many of us are acting on our “fast” thinking, panic-buying supplies and toilet paper because of the threat of the now known unknown. “Slow” thinking from considered reasoning and thought take a back seat when our instinct to survive is activated. But we do not have to let fear dominate our minds or our mood. We can’t choose when disaster strikes but we can choose how to respond.
In many ways, the Daily Maverick story has been a decade-long fight for safety, so we understand the challenges of trying to keep the ship pointed at the horizon in a time of extended panic and threats. We’ve had many highs and lows along the way, inflection points by the dozen. But two moments stood out as life-changing.
After years of grappling and fighting with the enormity of the task we’d taken on (sometimes hurling abuse at the universe for our predicaments), we found much-needed serenity when finally accepting that this is just the way it is, for us. This is our reality. That a digital media startup in South Africa during the lost decade of Zuma and Zuckerberg would be the toughest examination any of us would face. And that playing the victim card wouldn’t help — despite having every reason to feel entitled to be one. When we accepted our circumstances, our outlook changed. We started making better decisions and putting ourselves in positions to make good things happen. The second thing was giving up the fight to fight by ourselves. Acknowledging we could no longer do this alone, and reaching out to our most loyal readers for support to share our burden. After almost a decade of seemingly battling in the dark, pride and ego finally dismantled, allowing those two events to change our lives.
So if there is any insight we can offer in these times, it’s this: Let this time of crisis allow us the opportunity to reflect on what is truly important to us. How we live and behave as a part of the natural world and our villages that consist of many who are way more vulnerable than us. We will be tested in ways our generation has yet to experience and there will be casualties. This is our new reality.
Declaring a national disaster (five years past due in South Africa’s case) is an opportunity to galvanise our leaders into action to support our at-risk communities: the aged, the frail, the sick, the small business owners and those who don’t have the luxury of self-isolation. And yet, we can all show leadership at this time. When we choose community over self-interest we change lives, including our own.
And finally, we can also choose what to focus on, and what to let go of that is beyond our control. The 12 step fraternity says it best, in a mantra we could all lean on in times like these: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Peace and love
Styli
