In our quest to sound cool, we have failed our children

By Henry Munene

When the Scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught committing adultery to Jesus Christ, He dared any of them who had committed no sin to cast the first stone.

 At that point, it is written, Jesus started writing on the ground. Those who know say the Son of God was scribbling the names of great men who had done despicable things and who, nevertheless, found favour in the eyes of God – David, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and many others.

The lesson here is that human beings are a hypocritical lot who preach water by day and drink absinthe by night. But I think there are things that sections of society do and we have no option but to ‘moralise’, and even fire the first salvo of condemnation. Take the case of the young women at the Coast who are alleged to have been caught getting filmed while committing bestiality with a dog.

Now, when matters get to this level, the first instinct is to pillory the girls for their greed and for the pall of embarrassment the whole unfortunate saga casts over our tourism industry.

One only hopes that the piracy circuit that operates on the other side of Tom Mboya Street does not lay its hands on such stuff. 

For me, such things are a  pointer to the fact that our moral compass may have gone berserk.  We have blamed the presence of skimpily dressed youths braving the Nairobi night chill on poverty. The argument goes that, “You know, there are no jobs and these young people have to survive; besides, who buys?”

But nothing even begins to rationalise the dog saga. How did we sink so low, you ask? Allow me to moralise, which is not a very cool thing to do in 21st Century Nairobi.

First, we have failed future generations by treating children like adults. Instead of weaning them on good values and spiritual nourishment right from childhood, we take them ‘out’ to bars on Sunday, where they split time between bouncing castles and lessons on how to drink copious amounts of alcohol and devour red meat with carnivorous relish. We seem to have misconstrued children’s rights to mean we should never correct their behaviour. We seem to have left them at the mercy of the wild Internet, adolescent hormones, peer pressure and the psychotic wiles of sex slave-drivers.

Whereas I would have been whipped numb for going to swim in River Itimbogo instead of attending Sunday School, the modern child would be asked, “Did you have fun, sweetheart?” The pastoral lessons we had every Friday in primary school would most likely make a ‘cool’ modern parent to change a child’s school. For anything that teaches children how to grow into responsible adults has all of a sudden become interminably ‘boring’.  All this thanks to the socio-cultural perestroika that teaches us nothing but unbridled consumerism.

We have been taught by the market forces to lust after cash and the ‘development’ it brings. Well, there is nothing wrong with cash. We all need money and ‘development’. However, we often miss the point that development is not only defined in monetary terms. Hollywood, for instance, may be many light years away from Nairobi in terms of concrete-and-steel development, but in the area of moral development, we are – at least traditionally – in the First World.

We need to get it into our minds that human dignity and propriety has no cash price. As a matter of fact, civilised societies seek wealth to shield their people from the indignities that come with poverty.

Thus, to put economic wealth ahead of human dignity, as some of us may be doing, is to put the cart before the ox.  It is a perfect case of moving away from civilisation itself to seek the means towards the same civilisation.

-The writer is Revise Editor for County Weekly

Hmunene@standardmedia.co.ke