World isn’t ending

By OYUNGA PALA

There are Kenyans who have a knee jerk moral response to bad news. Every time, they hear something that does not agree with their moral sensibilities, they quickly jump to one conclusion: “The world is coming to an end.”

When you look at the world through the prism of disaster and seek most of your good news from television and newspapers, things can look pretty bleak. Every day, some bizarre news item comes to light, there is a tendency for many to take to the moral high ground and look down at humanity with deep lament. So when two men decide to share one woman, it is a ‘sign of the end of times’.

The unimaginable acts always have to do with acts of sexual deviance that are often described as not in tandem with human behaviour. Homosexuality is always the first stop on the slippery slope to societal decadence. With the news of bestiality getting more frequent, the blame has shifted to modernity and globalisation, which is just a roundabout way of saying ‘blame it on the West’ and ‘these must be the end times’.

The moral police are always on the prowl, to seek out signs that prove that our society is facing inevitable disaster as result of our own excesses. I sort of wish the same moralists would moan as loudly when high level corruption cases feature in the news. That they would descend on economic saboteurs, with the same scorn that they pour on lesbians.

That greedy leader would be subjected to the moral lament that drug users are used to hearing. That moralist would hound perpetrators behind mega-shilling scandals with the same fury that meets witchcraft suspects. That they would realise eventually, as Oscar Wilde said, that morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.