Celebrating life, celebrating differences
It’s good to be alive today to see another day,
So hey,
Celebrate life
No house is built using one single material, several must come
together. God did not put humanity into a world as a single tribe, he put us
here by the millions of tribes. He put us here in Uganda; Acoli, Baganda,
Ankole, Karimojong. He put us here in
the world with the English, Aborigines, Scandinavian, Persian. God made sure
that we would be ultimately and eternally different. Difference is one of the
most human aspects in existence. It just simply comes naturally to our world. Identical
twins come off different on several issues and things, blood family often have varied
blood types and different DNAs.
Difference, Humanity! Not different humanity! That is our
truth
I have taken several moments through my brief life span past
to consider that we are always at conflict about something as people and I have quickly learned that conflict is not
always bad. Conflict makes us question and questions always bring us to
answers. Answers inevitable bring us ideas and ideas are always the beginning of
something new, something fresh, something different. However, I deas must be
birthed not indoctrinated if the must evolve into something good and beautiful.
A forced ideology either always self distracts or aborts prematurely.
You see all we need to learn to do to manage our differences
is choose the perspective from which we view it….. Because hey, Jesus is either
God or he is simply one of earth’s greatest teachers, no? Pork is the most
unthinkable meal for a Muslim but the Monkey meat celebrating Congolese think both
Pork and Monkey are wonderful. I have not tried Monkey so I can only agree with
them as far as Pork is concerned. Still, they know how to do a great 10 minute
song on guitar and get you dancing while they are at it. They are definitely
adorable. Just think of a doctor prescribing WEED to William Wilberforce and
picture one giving you the same dosage today and you’ll know that you are a
rather poor judge of both character and places. I usually choose to let the
judge cap be and I wear the huh! Or the no way! Cap instead. I mean a right
handed fellow can’t write left handed, not normally anyway.
I wonder several times at some of my thoughts as a child
especially during my primary school days. I always had a fantasy about living
alone in the world. I often imagined that the world had one reality; me, and
that everyone else was a subject of my existence. The hole that kept growing in
my theory was; the Kiboko form my teachers always hurt, the conversations with
my friends during class hours were always the best ones, and catch this, I
always wanted to be invited to join a group. I certainly always wanted someone
to want my groups. That is how I dumped the theory of a world subject to me.
The world is subject to us together as humanity. No single man is in charge of
its direction. No single man should be. That is the true order of things. We
can influence eachtoher, we cannot control eachother. We certainly can try with
a little success. But time will always bring us back to a place where those
whom we only choose to influence follow our wishes better than those we
control. Ask GOD. I think He knows.
I have always lived by my own standards and ignore those
habits I don’t want. I have severally been assaulted for fighting to understand
things from a point of view that no one considered or even seemed to be
interested in exploring. I have never
wanted to make someone be a copy of me but hey, I guess I may have unconsciously
tried to nudge someone in my direction. The direction I believed right. I guess
that is what we as humans do naturally. We try to make everyone go into our
direction and those that go the other way are tagged “rebellious”.
When Muslims FIGHT for their way of life choosing to follow
Islam and Arabic ways, we tag them ‘Islamists’ a word with no apparent proper
meaning except that it is loaded with accusation because it has been made to
seem that where the words Arab or Islam occur, there goes trouble. In the
end, we have a world where the word American intervention comes off as ‘holy
grail’ as much as Arabic and Islamic involvement spells of terror. Maybe this
terror is the creation of our pessimistic hate of the version of different
their community stands for.
We would rather go for American styled polygamy where you
can have sex with whomever you please, get kids with four different women, and
pay alimony than for Arab and African styled polygamy where you put a ring on it before you get some, have kids
or whatever and keep it till death parts you as you work out what life throws
at you together. In Arab and African communities, you marry those women you
fall for and take them into your household and live together OFTENLY IN PEACE
AS A FAMILY UNIT where the co-wives respect and even grow on each other. In
Africa, our culture says don’t get some get all of it, In the West, you get as
little of it as possible if it involves responsibility and it is not power or
oil. Or by the way, I would probably choose to be American over being Arabic. The
reasons are obvious. I am A Christian who lives liberally and kinda understands
the American way more than the Arabic way. I wouldn’t trade being Ugandan for any of them
though. I LOVE UGANDA. It’s a small cozy country where live under “selfish
leaders” who will not trouble you if you do not trouble them. The land is
fertile, water is abundant, and the People are hospitable, wonderful even. Ask
anyone who is not fixiated on the excesses of Amin Dada who by the way was a flawed
overly eager nationalist with limited skills but still a goodish man.
The point I am making is quite simple. What ever we focus on
grows. If the version of different we constantly think on is negative, it grows
and we find more and more evidence of it in our world. If however, we focus on
the positive aspects of our differences, we end up learning from those
different from us and often, our strong points rub off on the other because
human beings are naturally built to aspire to become better. Everytime we see
something better than we possess, we unconsciously choose to set it on our
dream list. We constantly compare ourselves with those different from us
scorning the points we disagree with and envying the ones we appreciate. If we
gave a little more consideration for that, we would have lesser and lesser
racists, fewer and fewer terrorists( I mean they all claim to be fighting for
their ways of life) even less wars and lessened definitely economic turmoil. We
would see….
A colorful world of many shades
We would celebrate our differences
We would discover that what’s in the heart matters most of
all…..
But you see, our reality is that these things exist among us
and we my friends must jump on to the bandwagon and choose a side because you
are either with us or against us. If you don’t love us, you must hate us and we
you. That is how it has always been. That is how it will always be. It must be either
democracy as defined by us or Auotcracy as defined by us again. It does not
matter that African Traditional leadership was successfully democratic under a hereditary ruler and as a
result, we do not seem to understand anything else to date better than that we
must respect our elders in the village, honor our cultures and revere our ancestors
and then go to the city and try to be modern for our economic dictators from
abroad.
The real human battle the way I see it is a battle for one
group to sell its agenda as the better one over all others. Ask those in Uganda
who fight for Ugandan Cultures and reject homosexuality and you’ll find that some
on earth think only their western endorsed cultures are truly beautiful. Of course
you’ll never know until a shapely beautiful dark complexioned woman kneels
before you to serve you of her own volition and serves you a meal from a clay
pot cooked with great love. Oh! I don’t expect that many of you will understand
this last sentence but, visit Uganda and give us some Tourism dollars and you’ll
say
Oh! Uganda
May God uphold thee!
