How I miss the social harmony of the past!

I am sitting here and reminiscing about my youth. In my deep thoughts I just wonder if my children and those of their generation would ever understand how beautiful it was then. The society that brought me and my contemporaries was just wonderful. We were raised in the kibbutz, a society that lived collectively and shared everything including space. We were truly raised by the village. We shared all and sundry. We were what the people who have read the big books called a classless society. We had, within our villages and clans, people who were rich by all standards. We also had people who in today’s standards were poor and destitute. Yet the village that brought us up had social safety net and programmes that made it impossible for strangers to discern the rich from the poor. We had all that made us better than our children and the age mates. Our society shared the happiness and sadness and joy and sorrow. We had a society constructed to provide for one another. A better endowed family openly shared with the family that was not. We never had the haves and the have-nots within our societal structures. Yes I know people might think this is an exaggeration of the past life. We were one big family. We had the grandparents, uncles, aunts and other communal siblings. We were never able to distinguish between our cousins (born of our paternal uncles and maternal aunts) and own siblings. We knew our cousins to be those born of our aunts (bo-rakgadi). We were brought up together. This meant we lived happily together. We used to sit around the fireplace to listen to fairy tales and other stories about our past heroes and heroines, as related by our grandparents. We would never starve and the elderly would make sure all were fed from the same source. There was communal cooking. We shared and ate from one bowl (mogopo) and were had no modern fears of infecting one another. We had less sickness than we experience now. As growing up children, we slept together on traditional mats. This type of communal upbringing made us grow to know that we are one family. This brought to the fore the spirit and culture of togetherness. We as people were there to know that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” We grew very closer to each. We were a selfless people. Our modern society is devoid of such social harmony. We have supposedly moved on and have made it in our individuality. Our children have no connection with our past. They don’t share plates like we used to. Our society has abandoned our letsema and other communal chores of sharing practices. We have our distinctively rich relatives whose children don’t understand why Daddy should sit with strangers from within our villages. Our lifestyle has been modernized. We no longer share rooms, let alone beds. The spirit of brotherhood and love for one another is foreign to all of us. We have left our good old days behind…