That Is Life.

Sometimes, you experience a difficult season of life. And then you encounter someone who's going through something much worse than anything you've ever imagined. That sobers you up on the spot. You realize that, while things are bad on your end, you still have some room to manoeuvre. You still have options. You're not up against the wall like this other person. 

That's life for you. 

The sad thing is that sometimes, it takes years for you to realize that this other person has hit rock bottom. To all appearances, he's an achiever, living a full life. He seems to be at the pinnacle of his career and to have a happy, thriving family. His social media accounts confirm that impression. It is only when he attempts suicide and fails or ends up in the ICU after years and years of drinking his liver into submission that you realize that not all was well.

That's what life sometimes is: experiences that you can hardly wrap your mind around and the realization that, despite it all, you can still dig deeper to find the strength to take a few more steps.

Don't look up

I just got done watching the film Don't Look Up. I remember that I felt distinctly sad watching the earth's last moments... Perhaps it was because I felt that it was only a matter of time before a similar scenario played out in real life.

The idea that we and everything that we know will one day come to an end is humbling. I can't help thinking, if we can all cease to exist in a flash, then what does that say about our significance and about the meaning that we have attached to so many things? We think we are so important that some of us actually have an anthropocentric view of the entire universe. That is to say, we believe that we are the raison d'etre for all that exists. The idea that a comet strike could obliterate everything and make it seem as if we never existed makes me realize how ridiculous that idea is.

Does the fact that we possess this state of mind called intelligence that allows us to take note of our surroundings and to study them and attempt to master them make us a somewhat different and more noteworthy species? Are we really different in that sense? Do other species possess the same traits but simply have a less observable impact than we do (from our perspective)? Alternatively, do whatever unique traits we have and our unfortunate tendency to increasingly view ourselves as being separate from our surroundings mean that we pose a threat to the greater good?

"Not up to Par"

I remember being in high school in Kenya and, on two separate occasions, having a male schoolmate walk up to me and either tell me he didn't like my hairstyle or it was not up too par. The key word in that sentence: male. Did I mention that the schoolmates in question were both black?

My sin: my hair was unrelaxed. Whether it was neat and tied back or in neat braids/lines, it was apparently a problem. Hair was not hair unless chemicals or extreme heat had been used to straighten it. There were "approved hairstyles" for the middle class. And they were so well-known that even the boys knew what was acceptable and what wasn't. I remember some others asking me if I was saved because, apparently, that was the only rational explanation for not relaxing one's hair: a religious injunction.

Imagine I was just okay with my hair as it was. In the same way that I was okay with my skin as it was. There was no compelling reason to change them radically, no conviction on my part that if I used relaxer (or bleach), a new Jerusalem would descend to earth. I also wondered why people felt that girls and women had to straighten their hair (or lighten their skin) when boys and men of the same species, with the same genetic heritage, didn't seem to have the same rule hanging over their heads.

Other People Exist and Their Voices Matter

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 millions when he lived. They say, "Think about his relatives. Imagine how they would feel if they read these words." And that's a valid point, of course. Their relatives and friends are human beings whose experiences and feelings matter in the scheme of things. They have lost a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend. They are experiencing grief. I respect that and their right to mourn. But, having said that, don't the feelings of the relatives and friends of their victims matter too? If your father was illegally gunned down by a shooting squad because he was an inconvenience to the regime, don't you have a right to express anger about the man/woman who okayed that execution or the man/woman who helped cover it up and protect the killers after the fact? Don't you have a right to be angry when people describe that man or woman as some saintly figure who brought prosperity to the nation?

Now, by the same token, if you are living in a country where injustice prevails and brutalizing poverty hobbles the majority of the population, do you not have a right to be angry about the status quo? Do you not have a right to criticize the men and women responsible for that, whether or not they are good fathers/mothers, donate to the church, or cry when they're sad?

Do people really understand that power is a huge responsibility and that when you gain political power and/or economic power, your capacity to influence society negatively or positively increases exponentially? Do they understand that the actions or words of a man or woman with power can make the difference between life and death for a miserably poor man or woman who has never met him/her? Do they understand that when you pay someone a salary to serve you as an elected leader or as a government employee, he/she is actually accountable to you? If you paid a mechanic to fix your car, you wouldn't make excuses for him if he brought it back to you with the original problem unfixed. If your children's school hired an alcoholic with a suspended license to drive the school bus, you wouldn't calmly accept it. So why is it that people expect others to be accommodating of those who do the equivalent to thousands or millions of citizens?

These are the questions that I ask of my Kenyan brothers and sisters who think that their comfort in their tribal cocoons and upper class haunts absolves them of the responsibility to acknowledge that other people exist and their voices matter.

"African men do not talk about kitchen issues in public."

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 food, one of our most basic needs? We're talking about food, not an afternoon of golf in a country club. Without sufficient access to affordable food, people experience malnutrition and some die. These people include the most vulnerable among us: children. Yet some among us are actually telling men to shut up as some of our people face starvation or struggle with malnutrition because it is the "manly" thing to do.

You know, there's only so much we can blame our politicians for. At some point, we have to accept that we, the people, are the worst kind of idiots.

BEING "PERFECT" AIN'T EASY

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? 

Sexual Assault and Gendered Stereotypes

http://nutritionafrica.blogspot.com/2014/10/sexual-assault-and-gendered-stereotypes.html

Lately, I’ve been coming across articles that address cases of gendered violence where the victims are men. The most recent piece I’ve read is “When Women Sexually Assault Men,” by Livia Gershon. The thing that strikes me most about the article is its emphasis that we often dismiss the idea that a man has been sexually assaulted because of the stereotypes that we subscribe to. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the same holds true for our dismissal of the idea that a woman has been sexually assaulted:

THE NOTION THAT SEXUAL assault of a man by a woman is impossible, and even laughable, rests on the same gendered assumptions that are also used to downplay assaults on women by men. Even after decades of feminist activism, many discussions of sexual violence still center on telling women to stay sober and be cautious around men. The ideas behind that advice—the image of men’s sexual desires as constant and all-consuming and of women as the gatekeepers to sex—also makes it impossible for many people to imagine men as victims. If men are always seeking sex, and frequently shot down by disinterested women, then they should be grateful—or at least not traumatized—by any kind of sexual attention from a woman. Taking sexual coercion against men seriously gives us even more reason to fight against those stereotypes.

These stereotypes have an impact on male victims of sexual assault and on their likeliness to report their experiences:

Men who experience sexual assault or other violence by intimate partners are less likely than women to report the incidents to the police. They frequently think no one will believe a woman sexually assaulted them, are embarrassed at not being able to fend off an attack by a woman, or harbor fears of being perceived as “gay” or not masculine for not wanting to have sex, Struckman-Johnson suggests.

For me, this particular article is valuable because it touches on something I’ve been thinking about: the idea that men and women are radically different, enshrined in the title of a popular book, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” I haven’t read the book, but I have noticed how quick people are to grab on to the idea that men and women are so dramatically different that we have to learn each other’s “languages” and ways of thinking in order to better understand each other.

Of course there are differences between men and women, based on biology and on the ways we have been socialized (and it follows that there are further variations based on culture, class, and other factors). But I think that, in our eagerness to emphasize these differences, we’ve been too quick to sweep our similarities under the carpet. By denying our similarities, we make it more difficult to recognize that other people have the capacity to feel disempowerment, pain, and shame, as we do. So we allow ourselves to diminish their experiences of discrimination and trauma, claiming that they can’t be as bad for “those people” as they are for us.

I’m also starting to think that the tendency to emphasize our stereotyped differences is a way to avoid seeing ourselves and others as individuals. If we can put everything down to the rationale that “men are this way” or “women are that way,”, then we don’t have to recognize that people are individuals who subscribe to philosophies/belief systems and have personalities and the right to choose what kinds of situations to get into. Ultimately, this makes it easy to avoid examining our own behavior and motivations and taking responsibility for them. 

Quoted in the article by Livia Gershon, Struckman-Johnson puts it well. She points out that stereotypes about women’s and men’s sexuality make it possible for female perpetrators to rationalize their sexual aggression and minimize the traumatic experiences of their victims:

 “Because of the idea that men are sexually oriented and wanting it all the time, it kind of lets them off the hook,” she says. “They get to assume they’ve got a ready and willing partner here who would just love to have sex with them. That is not the case, that’s denying individuality, it’s denying personality, it’s denying people’s rights to choose their sexual situations.”