Oh, boo hoo …blow me a whistle
I have mad respect for media folk, you know, the kind that spend hours on air talking. It’s not as easy at looks. Yeah, it’s not like digging in a shamba – it’s probably worse. At least when you’re in the shamba, you can let your mind wander.
You can go through a list of chores and chide yourself for throwing a pink sock into the bucket that you filled with Jik and all your white underwear. And then laugh out loud when you remember you soaked your husband’s undies first. The bugger should wash his own damn boxers any damn way.
Maybe that’s why I’m an unmarried parent. Hey, there’s not enough wife material to go around. When you’re dealing with something that was last manufactured in the 1950s, it can be hard to find. Buuut I digress. Back to the shamba.
You rest one leg on your jembe and make plans to acquire a non-carcinogenic wheelbarrow. Look into the horizon and imagine a plot full of kunde, which you will nurture to maturity with the subsidised fertiliser that has just been offloaded at the Port of Mombasa.
You calculate how much it will cost to transport the 10 litres of milk your dairy cow has so graciously allowed you to harvest from her udders, because your county government has just installed a cooler and Brookside will buy every last drop the heifer can produce.
You make a mental note to M-Pesa your chama treasurer on the 5thinstead of the 1st because your salo hasn’t checked in. Last time you spoke, she was gushing about some hare-brained scheme that involved bidding for a tender. You balked at first but hey, ain’t nothing wrong with being a PYT – pretty, young tenderpreneur.
And just like that, the day has come and gone. Before you know it, you’re back in the house going to war with your toddler and losing, never mind all the muscle you’ve been building on the farm.
Even then, you don’t have to speak because your kid is quite happy to talk to herself, and her nanny is so accustomed to communicating IN ALL CAPS via text message that she says nothing at all. Not even a lower-case whisper.
Now the folks on television? They don’t get the luxury of silence. They must open their mouths, enunciate and articulate whether they accidentally tie-dyed their husband’s undies or not.
Politicians on the other hand, abuse their right to remain silent with a constant flow of verbal diarrhoea. Their mouths are literally open sewers. And when they’re not stinking up the House, they are white washing it with lies. Yeah, it’s not like all of them are bad. Many of them are just plain ineffectual – and that is much worse. Because the only thing necessary for the triumph of foolishness over common sense is for clear-thinking wo(men) to do nothing.
When ‘we the people’ have trusted you to open your mouth, enunciate and articulate on our behalf, you really shouldn’t let your mind wander while your mouth is still engaged. ‘Irregardless’, that’s the kind of nonsense we have been forced to accept. When a politician speaks, and a citizen is not there to hear it, it is still inconsequential.
That said, yesterday’s whistle-blowing shenanigans on the floor of that most comedic House may have been of even less significance. As an act of protest, it was lacking in finesse. For a moment there, I almost wished for the dissenting politicians to speak. Hard to imagine, I know. By the end of it, none of what the President said stuck because the true state of our nation had already played out on centre stage. It’s hard to say which side of the political divide will rise from the sewer smelling like their poop doesn’t stink. Probably both. There can only be one loser in this trifecta and that loser is us. What can I say? Shit happens.
