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| The Easiest Choice Of All |
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We all make choices some good and some bad, but choices all the same and these choices impact heavily on our lives and how these lives turn out yet don’t we all want to choose the best life has to offer for us?
I would have thought that would be the most obvious choice we would all make. Whether we like it or not choices are a constant if not the most constant fact of life. Right from the time one wakes up until you go to bed however many or few hours later choices are involved every step of the way.
However there is one fact in life we have no choice over and that is the fact that we will die. But whether we live a good life or not - there we have a choice. But it seems to us we seem to have forgotten either that we have choices or that highly improbable as it sounds we have forgotten how to choose.
I say improbable because right from your first waking seconds you have to decide, make a choice. To get out of bed or not, to shower or not, brush your teeth, have breakfast drive, take a bus or matatu, walk or cycle, work or go to a bar - all these are choices. Then you are back in the house in the evening and you even end up choosing what time to go to bed usually choosing before you fall asleep what time to set the alarm clock to wake you up. Phew! What an awful lot of choices we go through during each and every single day.
A lot of these choices are made mechanically without second thought (habit?) many with cold calculation as a means to a certain end e.g career or job prospect, wife, girlfriend a boss we are trying to impress, boyfriend, husband ad infinitum.
So why is it that when it come to choices which adversely affect our lives we casually and deliberately make choices which are patently suicidal. I was watching 'Eyes On The People' on Nation Television with Zawadi Mawanda on 26.01.03 where AIDS was being discussed and the overall impression I got from members of the public on the floor was what can we do? There was such a projection of despair-like lamenting that for a minute I wondered was I really on the same planet with some of these people?
Statements like "lets be practical" were constantly thrown at Archbishop Mwana Nzeki and other panelists. "Times have changed" and "things are different now" or "we must be realistic nowadays". Baffled, I thought to myself, what has really changed? Sex is still there as it has been from the time of Adam and Eve. Girls were still getting pregnant out of wedlock - nothing new there. So why were these people talking as if they had discovered something totally new which somehow the rest of us mere bumblers seemed to have missed?
What seemed to be emanating from them in waves was a feeling of helplessness and despair to a death through AIDs and a resignation that nothing on earth could help them. The whine "We can’t help ourselves!" clung to them like a miasma. This could not be I thought to myself. Had somebody robbed these people, or indeed our youth even adult Kenyans of the power of choice? Who was this who had stolen in when nobody was looking and stripped us of this vital power leaving us exposed as babes in woods to the lethal ravages of HIV/AIDs?
With my heart racing madly, lights bursting in front of my eyes as I was overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness, I slowly sank down onto a chair. This could not be true. I shook my head slowly to clear it and as the room came back into focus again my wifes face swam into view peering anxiously down at me and I could hear her voice as if from a distance asking me what was the matter?
After assuring her that I was okay, I gave myself a wan smile as I realised all was still right with the world. I as indeed all the other million’s of Kenyans had not been robbed. We still had the power of choice. Unfortunately many adults now behave like the youth who have always in every generation from Adam felt indestructible cursed with the ‘it could never happen to me!' syndrome. In spite of all that they are being told, they still engage in risky sexual behavior. But here too the adults were behaving in exactly the same way.
This brings to mind the poet Homer and the 3,000 year old story of Odysseus and his travels home from the Trojan Wars. In one of these adventures they land on the island of the Lotus Eaters.
It was a beautiful island and Oddyseus wanted to stay there a while and rest. He sent in some scouts to find out if the natives were friendly. After they failed to return Odysseus went to find out what had happened. What he found was that the scouts had met up with the locals and shared some food with them. But their food, the lotus was some kind of drug and the scouts got hooked and forgot all about the mission, about going back to Greece, in short everything.
Odysseus dragged them back to the ship kicking and screaming, tied them to their seats and managed to get them away.
Substitute sex for the Lotus fruit and HIV/AIDs for Odysseus’ objective of getting back to Greece. As long as we are stuck eating the fruit, we will not have time to think of anything else. Not death through HIV/AIDs, not using condoms, not not having casual sex. But we all have an Odysseus within us. Call it ‘Choice.’ It is that simple. All this talk of being to helpless to control ourselves our passions is stuff and nonsense. Next we will allow rapists to get away with rape saying they couldn’t control their desires. No, no don’t say we can’t get there! Kenyans already stand by and watch as women are stripped naked in broad daylight for dressing immorally, yet by twilight most of the city is adorned by prostitutes of all ages some literally babies, and nobody says anything. We ignore this by choice!
As a recovering alcoholic, I can no longer drink alcohol until the day I die. This is simply because for an alcoholic to continue drinking, is to die. Yet nobody is tying me down or chaining me to my bed. I can walk into a bar anytime and order alcohol. Even the barmen who know me and are aware that I have stopped drinking will not refuse to sell me alcohol if I want it. But I don’t want to die just yet. So I don’t drink. Choice!
Forget about to use or not to use condoms, you are in love (love is not sex) it can’t happen to me (ha!) and definitely you are not indestructible, (military would have snapped you up). HIV/AIDs is here with us. Until a cure is found, you contract it - you die. That is a contract So guys and gals, get real get back to earth. You cross the road in front of a speeding car, you die. I start drinking again, I die. We all have casual sex and get AIDs - we all die! That is the choice - easy. But as one of the clergymen said on the programme, if people still can’t change then it is unfortunate but they will just have to die! I concurred. Think about it after all, it is your life and you only get one of them.
By David Ogot
© January 2003, Nairobi
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