What can you do? I mean they are the big leagues and you’re nowhere to any league. The most dangerous and at times fatal mistake you could do is clash with the wrong enemy, and also waltzes with the wrong friends. This is how the world works. The bigger and the higher the league you’re in the more you flex your muscles. Yes, there are leagues where you’ve muscles to flex and leagues where other flexes theirs at you. Through your money or through your power of office you bump a few heads here and there. That’s the case with the big league countries too; whenever they don’t like something about you they flex their missile muscles at you. I told you, they are the big leagues!
A month or so back a few of us media pole were hanging around some coffee shop when one guy, the only non-media person in the group, tried to drive some common sense into our brains.
“Look the ferenjis don’t seem to be happy about what you guys are doing.”
“What are you talking about?
“I’m talking about what you guys write.”
“What do you mean they’re not happy?”
“They are not happy with all the hostility against them they see in your works.”
What! What hostility! Did the guy say hostility! Outrageous would be too feeble a word.
“And what do you propose we do?”
“Well, play things down. Be friendly and sooner or later they’ll come to their senses.”
And what about until they come to their senses, if they ever do? And what is the big deal about their senses? They can copyright them internationally if they feel like doing so. Unhappy ferenjis over what is said in the local media! Come on, there must be a better punch line.
Talking of such things there is one factor that isn’t at all comforting. Quite a sizeable sections of put everything and everyone in one basket when it comes to denouncing
‘the Western hostility’ against us. Nothing could be further from the truth. You know all the bias, prejudice and outright injustice has never been about the common people, the ones we put in the category of the ‘man in the street.’ It has never been about the housewife somewhere in mid-America or the family man in the suburbs of Oslo. It has never been about the hundreds of thousands filling the stadiums in all the Western cities or the hundreds of millions going about their daily life oblivious to what their politicians were messing with.
It’s about individuals who find themselves in the corridors of power and are adamant to use the situation to their personal ends. It’s about certain media personalities who are out to prove their loyalty to their employers and spew their uninformed, arrogant and in many cases racist prejudices. It’s about people who abuse their political clout to bolster personal friendships.’ It’s about those who are still reeling with Jim Crowe mind and looking down at an entire content and its billion plus people.
I read somewhere that Ethiopians have developed hatred for Westerners. What kind of disturbed mind believes such nonsense! They are trying to put an entire nation in that one box that will serve their interest of giving this nation a bad face. Yes, many are angry with some sections of the Western world, and some might have stored some hatred. Looking back at what has been happening to us and what might happen until the dust settles for good I don’t blame those who might say “Oh, how I hate those people!” Yes, being nice to all near and far is wonderful. But does that mean staying quite when they are trying to ride their rollercoaster over you? Does it mean to stay mute while they are letting out narratives after narratives trying to put you, your thousands of years of history and your country underwater? In fact we around here are the nicest lot. We don’t use the expletives direct or otherwise that they are so fond of using in whatever they write or say against us.
Play it down! Really!
The Ethiopian Herald January 23/2022