Interpretation of ‘Contemporary Realities’

Witoubou Newmai

 

“The greatest thing this nation can do for humanity is preserve and protect our liberty, to provide hope for beleaguered peoples everywhere that there is still a place of refuge for those who are oppressed by tyrants promising heaven on earth.”

 

American attorney and author, Marc Nuttle has said this line in the later part of his book, “Moment of Truth.”

 

A society becomes a walking-dead when it fails to provide hope; the hope emanated from the paradigm of holding to its ground.

 

This is not a glamourous topic anymore in our society. However, this piece is another attempt to nudge the collective conscience of the society to recognize the ‘symptoms’ or characters of the walking-dead society.

 

One glaring ‘symptom’ or character of a walking-dead society is all about impulses overwhelming “thought-through process of decision-making” culture.

 

As life follows our thinking, destiny will get delayed due to the skewed engaging of issues which a society is confronted with.

 

Another character or ‘symptom’ of a walking-dead society is the misrecognition that it believes in itself when, indeed, it is trying to believe in itself.

 

We may also note that one character compliments the other, and in the process, they altogether manifest to a larger danger when things are not attended on time or nipped in the bud.

 

Competing labours for the proprietorship of issues in a society are nothing but manifestations of characters of this walking-dead society. Such is a scenario today in our society where most of the people fear to lose free handouts, and so they do not hesitate to allow valid issues to get squandered. This is also the point where people are trying to fit this culture conveniently in to “contemporary realities”, while resigning from their ground.

 

It is time our society updates itself without re-locating its paradigm as reminded by a Nigerian story where a witty bird called Eneke keeps updating its skill of protecting itself challenging the hunters’ ever improving weaponry front.

 

“Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.”  In the Nigerian fable, Eneke the bird says this when asked why it was always on the wing.

 

The bird Eneke, like any other bird used to perch on twigs but as the skill of its perpetrators advanced Eneke too found a method to cope with the changing situation.

 

In ‘Things Fall Apart’, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has illustrated the Eneke story to check the disintegrating tribes of Nigeria in the 19th century.

 

The whole argument is about how our society tries to escape, through the interpretation of “contemporary realities” on convenience, from its responsibilities of "preserving and protecting our liberty and also from providing hope".