BEING "PERFECT" AIN'T EASY

By -
The world is a messed up place. There’s no shortage of flawed people and things to point fingers at and express dismay about. Once in a while, doing so is worthwhile. By identifying problems and talking about them, we can sometimes fix them and make the world a little bit better.

The problem is that we often get caught up fixing other people and things and forget that we are just as flawed. And so we end up with the theologian who claims to be morally opposed to violence but is able to rationalize the particular forms of violence he is involved in perpetrating. Then there’s the uber-arrogant woman who gives her colleague a lengthy, public dressing down “for being arrogant” and somehow manages to convince herself that she is the epitome of humility.


It is easy to marvel at the stupidity/immorality/incompetence/corruption/laziness of “that person” or “those people.” The really hard bit comes when one has to put oneself under the microscope, magnify all the idiosyncrasies/failings/limitations, and endure an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny. It is difficult but it has to be done. Because, honestly, if we don’t hold ourselves accountable or seek to improve ourselves, who will? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mgeni siku ya kwanza...

By -
Remember when we were kids in primary school, and we had to sit through endless hours of Kiswahili, memorizing semi , methali and the like? And remember how Mr Macharia was constantly making us use that phrase, “ Chembilecho wahenga… ” in our essays? How about “ Wahenga hawakuropokwa na maneno waliposema… ” And then we’d have to complete the phrase with a saying or proverb that captured the apt sentiment for that paragraph. “ Haba na haba hujaza kibaba ” was a great favourite of mine. Apparently, those were choice condiments, guaranteed to spice up your essay and get you one step closer to that perfect score: 19 out of 20. (Mr Macharia would never give anyone the full 20 points.) We thought they were silly phrases back then, but still used them because we wanted good grades. And today … well I never thought I’d say this, but those old folks we were always referring to in our essays sure were wise. My life today is a testament to the deep truth encoded in those proverbs, sayings, r...
Read more

It's time we addressed the ethnic elephant in the room

By -
It often seems to me that the specter of race is omnipresent in America. One cannot go anywhere or do anything without encountering some passionate debate about race or racism or being thrown into some limiting category (i.e. "You can't do xyz because black/ white folk don't do that."). As a foreign black woman living in the United States, it exhausts me. But I have to be honest with myself. It's not a uniquely American thing. In my own nation, we are obsessed with ethnicity. I do not see any difference between racism and ethnic hatred. They are one and the same thing. Race is first-and-foremost an invention of overzealous scientists of past centuries. So when the pseudoscience is swept aside, all that actually remains to distinguish people of different 'races' is their culture. That thing we call 'race' in America should really be called 'ethnicity,' because most of the time when people talk about race, that is what they are referring to...
Read more

Salvaging The Help, a film worth watching

By -
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show On Saturday morning (yesterday) I watched the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC. The segment of the show that struck me the most was the one during which Harris-Perry and her panel of guests focused their attention on the film, The Help . The discussion was of interest to me because I had read many critiques of the film last year, shortly after it had been released. They had been tremendously negative, and had highlighted many of the film’s flaws. One of them had been the fact that the film hadn't been a historical portrayal of life for black domestic workers and their families. The critics had pointed out that the film glossed over the absolute brutality of racism in the Jim Crow South, and had emphasized that the physical violence and sexual abuse suffered by black women in the homes where they worked received no direct attention. Additionally, they had highlighted the fact that the black men featured in the film tended to be abusive spouses, in ...
Read more