I recently with a couple of guys sipping coffee for a price that used to get you a couple of double shots of whiskey! Hmmm. A guy they know ‘joins’ us. I’m not ‘join’ is the right expression. The way he acted he seems to think of himself like some general back from conquest of a whole continent and some more, maybe expecting a six-inch thick red carpet. “Oh, the greatest of the greatest, the cream of the brave on whose virtue we the downtrodden…” and so on, and so on.
It was later that I learned he was one among the recently- mushrooming species trying to put his finger in every pie; his latest pie being politics. No one has any idea what he really does for a living; for now, he happens to be the eleventh-hour political convert acting like USA 2020 was about him. Concerning people who try to glorify their skin at the expense of the populace, we’re in a real fix. It seems that in our politics there are too many playing the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ role giving orders and not enough of us foot soldiers to stand to attention.
You can’t help asking who the hell gave people the right to kick dust in our faces just because they have eight-digit bank accounts! Who do they think they are carrying themselves in meetings and in front of TV cameras like angels who missed earlier flights and just arrived to take over their messianic duties and deliver us from whatever!
I was told this particular guy was already making small waves on social media and I was advised to look him up. Why should I? If he hadn’t started talking and kept his silence maybe I’d have thought otherwise as I wouldn’t have any rotten tomato to throw at him. But, he talked politics, and that was enough for me to suspect the guy could know about a thousand and one things but that politics wasn’t one of them. We have more than our share of such folks, haven’t we?
This happened quite a while back. This celebrity singer was whiskey-soaking his anatomy at a popular Kasinches hangout. By his side, in perfect bond with his local brandy, sat a diminutive gentleman who they said was a university lecturer. At some point, for reasons no one ever found out, the singer growls at the lecturer, “Don’t you know who I am?” Of course, he was expecting that breath-stopping gasp and a passionate, “Oh, it’s you! Sorry; I can’t tell you how honored I am to be sitting by your side. I’m going to tell this to everybody.”
No, that wasn’t in the cards. Sipping his brandy with ‘intellectual precision,’ (What the hell does that mean!) he says, “Are you a football player?” What followed was, those present tell the story, the roof literally came down. The singer went into rants and obscenities not expected of a whiskey guzzling person and a celebrity at that! The lecturer, beaming and walking taller than he actually was, took his silent leave.
We hear about so much misplaced ego these days, don’t we? Humility, which should have been the chip on the shoulders of politicians and so-called activists, has been replaced by sheer arrogance. The public’s mood towards them is being tarnished beyond recognition. So much so that the term ‘Activist’ no more carries the meaning the Webster or Oxford Concise dictionaries attribute to it. We’ve rewritten it. For many, it now claims the notoriety of those ‘four-letter’ obscenities.
“So and so has become an activist!”
“Oh no! May God have mercy on his soul!”
When you see the synthetic self-importance of most of those on the political playing field, you can’t help wondering what drives them! Knowing some of them in their earlier man-in-the-street capacities, seeing them acting like deliverers of a revised version of the Ten Commandments plays on your nerves. I mean, an entire village has been trying to run this guy out of town, and what becomes of him! An activist!
We could have sold so much material to those Saturday Night Live guys if we only had known how to! When the ‘politically illiterate’ politician acts as if the Troy wooden horse was his brainchild, you feel we’re in the midst of one big reality show where what you see isn’t what you get. Those people are all taken over the TV channels, and that isn’t fair!
And, oh yes, there are the ‘intellectuals’ who also have turned the TV stations into their backyards dumping unrecyclable narratives which mostly profess to build new walls rather than bringing down the old ones. The things many of them say make your blood run cold. No wonder if people plead, “Oh Almighty, please have mercy on us. Pump some sense into these creatures.”
Some guys have been in academia for ages what do we get! Their arrogance; that’s what we get! They tell us we’re not who, or what we have been thinking we are for millennia! Eleventh-hour politicians telling us the neighbors we have been living side by side with for four and five decades have nothing in common with us! We ask; who gave you the right to look down on us with such contempt! Who gave you the right to claim the kings of kings’ throne while your accomplishment doesn’t make you eligible even to be butlers? Who gave you the right to claim the solutions to this land comes from you, and only you?
Look, one invention that’s long overdue is the ‘smart mike.’ We really need it; that technological breakthrough which automatically turns off when someone says something stupid or spills venom in the guise of political or intellectual discourse. Put the ‘smart mike’ to work and ours would have been among the quietest nations with sound pollution down 93%. Wouldn’t that be nice?
To those who put themselves on the highest pedestal and claim, “The people don’t understand what I’m saying!” we say that is not the point; the award-winning question is, do you understand what YOU are saying! Arrogance is not about behavior, it’s about missing screws! Maybe it is high time your doctor looked into the white matter upstairs. Look who’s talking! Maybe being an activist as a hobby might add some salt in this not very exciting existence of ours!
Oh, humility, where art thou!
The Ethiopian Herald January 10, 2020
