Delusions and Truths

So it’s that time of the year
again and the messages and warnings have started pouring in. Some are subtle
and coaxing while others are out rightly damning. Some are from unmarried
people who have so far found no use for it (yet) and the rest are from married people
whom in some way or other have it to thank for the success of turning their
partners from mere ‘iends’ (girlfr’iends’, boyfr’iends’, best fr’iends’,
childhood fr’iends’ etc ) into the more powerful ‘ouses’ (sp’ouses’).
So what are we talking about
here? It’s the Valentine’s Day.
Many reading this piece easily
fall into the second group of the ‘iend’ turned ‘ouse’ evolvers and belonging
to that group myself, I simply can’t understand where the driving force behind
the sudden apathy for the celebrated day derives its energy from. All say its
religion but without even wasting our time to put that into a microscope, we
know that it is not a real truth. It’s a delusional truth, so to speak. Delusional
truths are all around us. They present themselves in the wordings of the
extremely popular belief that speaks about the unconditionality (my computer tells
me that this isn’t a word in its dictionary and I tell it that it is a word in
mine, so let’s go with my dictionary here shall we?) of true love. Many people
are under the delusion that they themselves are firm believers in this belief
and then turn around and attach all sorts of conditions to the kind of love that
is acceptable to them. Actually, only a very small fraction of the believers in
that belief have actually been shown to have practiced it and I firmly believe
it is because of those people that we have continued to come across such
phrases as ‘Love is Blind’ , ‘Unconditional Love’ , ‘True Love’ and such like
words in the written literature today.
What the vast majority of those believers practice can aptly be described as strictly
conditional love. Men want unconditional love on the unconditional conditional
that it must come from beautiful women. Women who can whet their sexual
appetite. Women who look good when hung on the sleeve of a dinner jacket. Women
who can elicit some form of envy from other men for the man in the dinner
jacket. Women want unconditional love too but on the unconditional condition
that it is with a man who can very comfortably pay the bills. A man who can
afford to pay for the unconditionality of their conditional love. A man who can
afford a dinner jacket for the woman to hang on its sleeve.
We also see these delusional
truths in the attitude of those who want to make heaven (which is chiefly all
of us) but will do anything to avoid death. We all know that heaven can only be
achieved after passing the exam called death and we all, at least that is what
we believe, have been studying hard for that exam but nobody wants to sit for
it. We don’t even want to think about it. It is the same with ageing. We all
want to live long and see our children’s grandchildren but no one wants to get
old. We lie, we cheat, we trick and we falsify our minds and bodies (not to
mention those around us) into discriminating against anything that points to
the fact that we are ageing.
Most who claim that the energy they
use in condemning those who believe in celebrating Valentine’s day is derived
from religion are mainly presenting themselves in the same light as those
mentioned about. If religion is the reason, then it will be safe to conclude
that for one to take such a stand, one would have fulfilled the basic religious
duty of being a most romantic spouse on the other 364 days of the year. One
must also be someone who had never used the same celebration at an earlier time
to gain favours with a former ‘iend’ by pretending
to be a believer of the practice and by extension
a believer in romance being it that it is a practice associated with the belief
in romantic love. There is a very scientific conviction that for people to
crave something as badly as the world
seems to crave the romanticism that is associated with Valentine’s day, that something must be lacking in their
lives.
If you have ever used this
particular celebration to gain some (undue) advantage from a former ‘iend’ by enveloping
yourself in a light you don’t truly feel
any warmth in, then kindly spare us the rhetoric of your new found convictions.
If you are not in all honesty the role
model of what a good religious ‘ouse’ is in the remaining 364 days of the year,
also spare us. If you are still unmarried and haven’t (yet) found a reason to
use it to your (undue) advantage, we will listen to you when you successfully
become an ‘ouse’ without ever needing to add it to your arsenal of weapons used
during that transition. Until that happens, you also spare us. We only want to
hear from people who genuinely practice what they preach.
If we all did what our various religions tell
us to do regarding our loved ones all year round, then there wouldn’t be any
need for the world to be so fixated on this one day kept aside for the celebration
of love. The world is seriously love
deprived and its people ‘adorationally’ malnourished that is why this
celebrated day has such a colossal following. It isn’t because people don’t know
that it is pagan in origin or whatever its real origins are. There are too many
accounts of that for any single one to be given any serious credit by me.
Having lost the moral
justification to preach against this one day myself let me state her
unconditionally that I don’t believe that setting aside just one day a year to
celebrate love is enough. We need to make all the other days special love days
too. Let us make every day a Valentine’s Day so we can give these delusional
people some peace.
PLEASE!

ZAM