From thoughts into words

A brief conversation I had this morning has me thinking about one of the things that is wrong with a significant number of the people who belong to our upper classes and our political elites. A decent number of the folks who rule us and their relatives and friends seem to believe that nothing exists but their experiences and perspectives. So, to them, the fact that there is plenty of misery in Kenya at this precise moment is something that can be elided over, dismissed as a minor inconvenience. It's not them who have been experiencing the misery, so they don't want to talk about it. Some of these folks actually seem to think that Kenyans have been enjoying five golden years, if we are to believe their words. And when they encounter criticism of the regime or their favorite politicians, they experience a meltdown. They  remind me of all those people who come out guns blazing when people criticize a recently deceased politician who caused untold misery to thousands or mill

Someone wrote a comment to this effect in response to a post by a man about the elevated prices of maize meal (a Kenyan staple): "African men do not talk about kitchen issues in public." Now, under normal circumstances, I would have dismissed the comment as the silly opinion of one person. But these were not normal circumstances. To see what I mean, check out this article, which was published the other day:   http://www.nation.co.ke/…/Hey-were-men-we-dont-discuss-the-… As hard   as it is to believe, it appears that a noteworthy proportion of Kenyan men actually subscribe to this way of thinking. The sentiment was obviously designed to silence those who would criticize the government of the day. But it points to a larger problem in our society: People are actually conditioning themselves to be stupid in the name of preserving "African culture/masculinity." What kind of society tries to censor people who want to express concern about the accessibility of