a child is born to innocence,a child is drawn towards good.
why then do so many among us,go so horribly wrong?
what makes some walk the path of darkness, while others choose the light?
is it will?
is it destiny?
can we ever hope to understand the force that shapes the soul?
to fight evil, one must know evil.
one must journey back through time to find that fork in the road, where heroes turn one way, and villains turn another.

in every journey, the traveller must ask; “was the right path taken?”
many roads are long and winding, filled with those who have lost their way.
some forge their own course, guided by faith, seeking not a location, but a kindred soul.
others, step together, finding safety in the arms of another.
a few, remove themselves from the trail to avoid the path of temptation.
but those who watch the track too closely fail to see where it led them; they’re often all too surprised by their destination.

corruption.

corruption is killing Kenyans.
corruption is killing us.
from the Immigration officials at the entry points who accept bribes to allow undesirable aliens to pass through and who later come to commit outrages in the capital city to the Structural Engineer from the Council, who accepts a bribe and vouches for the structural integrity of a building which he doesnt know, has never seen and which months later, collapses and kills its tenants because the building codes werent strictly adhered to.
recruiters for the armed and disciplined forces, who ask as much as one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand Kenyan shillings in bribes to accept our sons and daughters into the armed forces, turning away worthy candidates who just happen to be poor and cant afford these steep bribes. and since these cadets bought their way in and didnt meritoriously earn it, they’re not serious in their training and career. and when you read that 40 policemen were ambushed and killed by cattle rustlers (people who steal cows in this day and era, for crying out loud!), you feel that it should have been the cattle rustlers who should have been recruited into the police.
members of the legislative assembly who gang-up and pass laws to increase their emoluments at the expense of teachers and doctors.
ministers of state who loot the public coffers which are under their jurisdiction.
a judiciary which allows perpetrators of felonies to walk, after a little something-something has been passed under the table and a file from the Registry disappeared here and evidence was tampered with there, and witnesses were intimidated in-between, and the case gets thrown out on a technicality.
we’re not blind; we see these things and we know them.
representatives of the people who’ve never been quite proved to be on the right side of that shadowy line that distinguishes the honest from the rest.
poaching cartels that decimate our precious wildlife and which are sponsored by individuals in government.
another container of narcotics has been impounded at the Mombasa port.
are the anti-narcotics people doing their work or was an insufficient bribe paid by the importer and the drugs impounded as a result? i have become a cynic because my government and my society have made me one.
these things are coming back home to bite us in our rears.
question is: what are we going to do about it?
i have raised the alarm, blown the whistle, pointed fingers at the perpetrators.
what kind of country and what kind of legacy are we leaving behind for our children and their children?

the king and the thief.

there was an Egyptian monarch named King Rhampsinitus, who had a vast chamber of stone built to house his great wealth. the builder was greedy and had designs on these treasures for himself and so contrived to insert a loose stone in the wall of the treasure house which could be easily removed to allow access. for some time, he availed himself of small portions of the king’s riches. time passed and he fell fatally ill. on his deathbed, he revealed his secret to his two sons who, before their father’s corpse was cold, began raiding the treasure house. they were not as cautious and prudent as their father and helped themselves to large quantities of gold and trinkets. it was not long before King Rhampsinitus noticed the deficit in his store of riches. puzzled as to how anyone could gain access to the chamber when all the seals were perfect and the fastenings of the room were secure, the king, acting now as detective, determined to solve this mystery and set a series of traps in the room. that very night, one of the brothers, more eager than the other, rushed into the treasure chamber and was caught in a vicious trap. there was no escape. he begged his brother to cut off his head so that when his body was found, it wouldn’t be recognized, thus it would not implicate his brother and sully their dead father’s reputation. reluctantly, the other thief agreed and decapitated his brother, taking his head away with him. the next day the king entered the chamber and was shocked to discover a headless corpse.

the king ordered the corpse to be exhibited on the walls of the city and set two of his men to guard it. Rhampsinitus reasoned that someone would mourn the death of this headless man – a wife, a mother or sister – and they would not be able to resist visiting the place of his exhibition to mourn. anyone doing so would be seized and brought to him. his reasoning was sound, for the dead thief’s mother ordered the surviving brother to devise some scheme to retrieve the corpse in order for it to have a proper burial. if he did not, she would expose his crime. with the aid of some skins of wine, the thief disabled the guards. while they slumbered in an alcoholic daze, he removed the body and took it home for his mother, but not before shaving half the beards of the two sleeping guards for pure devilment.

the king was both perplexed and annoyed to receive the news of the thief’s audacious actions. he contrived another ploy to trap him. it was an equally audacious scheme. he sent his daughter out into the town, into the lowest dives, to beg men to tell her what was the cleverest and most wicked thing they had ever done. if anyone told her the story of how he robbed the king, she was to lay hold of him and not allow him to escape. now the thief heard of this and was well aware of the king’s motive. he decided to accept the challenge. he produced a fresh corpse and cut off one of the arms at the shoulder and secreted it under his tunic. he went off into the town and found the king’s daughter. he told her the most wicked thing he had ever done was cutting off the head of his brother when he was caught in a trap in the king’s treasury, and the cleverest was making the guards drunk so that he could carry off his body. as he confessed these things, the princess caught hold of his arm – or what she thought was his arm. it was in fact the arm of the corpse. with ease, the thief slipped away and made his escape.

when the king heard what had happened, he was amazed at the nerve and ingenuity of this man and he sent messengers out to proclaim a free pardon for the thief and the promise of a rich reward if he came to the palace and made himself known. the thief, believing the proclamation, duly appeared before him. the king kept his word. admiring the wisdom of the thief, he gave him his daughter in marriage, saying: ‘the Egyptians excel all the rest of the world in wisdom, and this man excels all other Egyptians’.

in the on-going search for self, there are days we learn something genuinely new.
something uncovered, hidden, that we never knew was there.
something that surprises us.
and on that day of self-discovery, question it.
what kind of person are we?
does the hero or villain inside us win the day?
and as for the search for self continues, we look for answers everywhere;
in nature,
in God,
in tiny tragedies that may never be understood.
but still, we are driven to it, single-minded on one goal: to find our purpose on this earth, no matter what the ramification.
the friendships that may be hurt,
with the deals with the devil we need to make.

the message.

God is the only one with a message.
its a message of hope and urgency, because He’s not gonna wait much longer.
His message is a simple one: we are all connected.
our hopes,
our dreams,
our children’s future; reflecting back in each other’s eyes.
we fight our own personal battles, but we know we’re not alone.
because only together, we make our short time on this planet mean something.
only together can we be the stewards of our own destiny.
and we hold in our collective hearts one noble goal;
to save ourselves, save the world.

terrorism.

‘terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence – OUR violence – which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously.

terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.

it has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale.

terror, terror, terror, terror.

it is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil.

Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror.

in August of 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas.
today, we are fighting forever.
the war is eternal.
the enemy is eternal, his face changing in our screens.

once he lived in Cairo and sported a mustache and nationalized the Suez Canal.
then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin.
then he wore a muslim Imam’s gown and ate yoghurt in Teheran and planned Islamic Revolution.
then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly mustache and resided in a series of palaces in Baghdad.

terror, terror, terror.

finally, he wore a Keffiyah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then, again, a master of terror, linked by his Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who once lived in the Afghan cave.

it is man’s ability to remember that sets us apart.
we are the only species concerned with the past.
our memory gives us voice.
they bear witness to history so that others might learn.
so they might celebrate our triumphs.
and be warned of our failures.
there are many ways to define our fragile existence.
many ways to give it meaning.
but it is our memories that shape its purpose and give it context.
the private assortment of images, fears, loves, regrets.
for it is the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light,
the good with the evil,
success with disappointment.
this is what seperates us, what makes us human.
and in the end, we must fight to hold on to.

systems.

Plato, the father of the Western tradition, said that the hand is an organon, which in English means tool. to call the hand an organon is simply to say that it is a tool of the owner. Plato said the hand is an organon, the hammer is an organon and the hammering hand is an organon. however, the electric juicer that one finds in many kitchens today is something much more sinister. it masquerades as an organon but it is in reality something quite different. it is one of the many manifestations of the gigantic system that is devouring our world. like it or not, the age of tools has passed and the age of systems is here. you juice your oranges and make a delicious healthy drink. wonderful! but if you observe the juicer more closely, its more disturbing aspects can be noticed. the electricity to power the juicer arrives via a network of cables and overhead power lines, which are fed by power stations that depend on water pressure, pipelines or tanker consignments, which in turn require dams, offshore platforms and derricks in far-off countries. the whole chain only guarantees an adequate and prompt delivery if every one of its parts is staffed by armies of engineers, planners, financial experts, who themselves can fall back on administrations, universities, indeed entire industries – and sometimes even the military, as we have seen again and again. whoever thinks they are merely using a juicer is wrong. the juicer is a disguise; it is not a convenient tool at all but the final element of just one of the millions upon millions of tentacles of the great system that is wrapping itself around this world and every day tightening its grip. and so through such insidious disguises as the blender, the washing machine, the car and so on, these tentacles enter our daily lives and force us to service the system that will in fact one day, in the not too distant future, destroy us. the opportunity to opt out has long since passed. it is the nature of systems that they grow and take on a life of their own, eventually creating their own goals, different from those they were meant to serve. look at organized religions. today they are vast global systems with ambitions that are now a long way from the good words of their prophets. the goal of our current global system is to force more and more people to depend on the energy it provides. by using the system, we are writing it a blank cheque. and remember, Nature is the bank on which ultimately all cheques are drawn.

systems.

Plato, the father of the Western tradition, said that the hand is an organon, which in English means tool. to call the hand an organon is simply to say that it is a tool of the owner. Plato said the hand is an organon, the hammer is an organon and the hammering hand is an organon. however, the electric juicer that one finds in many kitchens today is something much more sinister. it masquerades as an organon but it is in reality something quite different. it is one of the many manifestations of the gigantic system that is devouring our world. like it or not, the age of tools has passed and the age of systems is here. you juice your oranges and make a delicious healthy drink. wonderful! but if you observe the juicer more closely, its more disturbing aspects can be noticed. the electricity to power the juicer arrives via a network of cables and overhead power lines, which are fed by power stations that depend on water pressure, pipelines or tanker consignments, which in turn require dams, offshore platforms and derricks in far-off countries. the whole chain only guarantees an adequate and prompt delivery if every one of its parts is staffed by armies of engineers, planners, financial experts, who themselves can fall back on administrations, universities, indeed entire industries – and sometimes even the military, as we have seen again and again. whoever thinks they are merely using a juicer is wrong. the juicer is a disguise; it is not a convenient tool at all but the final element of just one of the millions upon millions of tentacles of the great system that is wrapping itself around this world and every day tightening its grip. and so through such insidious disguises as the blender, the washing machine, the car and so on, these tentacles enter our daily lives and force us to service the system that will in fact one day, in the not too distant future, destroy us. the opportunity to opt out has long since passed. it is the nature of systems that they grow and take on a life of their own, eventually creating their own goals, different from those they were meant to serve. look at organized religions. today they are vast global systems with ambitions that are now a long way from the good words of their prophets. the goal of our current global system is to force more and more people to depend on the energy it provides. by using the system, we are writing it a blank cheque. and remember, Nature is the bank on which ultimately all cheques are drawn.