There's a whole world outside this. Shut outside. Kept out. Shutting this in... Don't stay inside and let your arteries harden, like theirs... What I'm asking you to look out for is - a moral sclerosis. Moral sclerosis. Hardening of the heart, narrowing of the mind; while the dividends go up. The thing that makes them distribute free blankets in the location in winter, while refusing to pay wages people could live on. Smugness. Among us, you can't be too young to pick it up. It sets in pretty quick. More widespread than bilharzia in the rivers, and a damned sight harder to cure.
It's a hundred per cent endemic in places like this Donnybrook Country and Sporting Club, and in all the suburbs that you're likely to choose from to live in. Just don't be too sure they're healthy, our nice clean suburbs for whites only.
- and your children. If you have babies... don't worry too much about who kisses them - it's what they'll tell them later that infects. It's what being nicely brought up will make of them that you've got to watch out for...Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World. 1966
This book was banned by the Apartheid government for 10 years beginning in 1975. That's how you know to read it.
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