Thinking on Paper

I was thinking about being a good person. I conclude that I am not a good person because I do not know how to be one. But I am not a bad person either because... I have never killed anybody before. I have only ever blocked one person on Twitter. I used to think if a person could block another person on Twitter then he or she could kill that person. I don't think so anymore. That's quite a stupid thought. I have never even seen the person I blocked before, I blocked her because I was tired of seeing her nonsense tweets about how poor people deserved their poverty and how everybody that is poor is hopelessly lazy. And how she scored 406 in JAMB. And how she forgot serious money inside her bag. I felt bad for blocking her but only at that instant. I wonder how I would feel about her if I know her in real life. I'm just grateful I don't. I had blocked her before her rape story came up. (Just to clear this up, I believe the rape story).

I've been thinking about loyalty too, and how complex a subject matter loyalty is. Loyalty is an extremely complex thing. It is unfair to try and measure loyalty because measuring loyalty is like measuring kindness. It is not impossible, it is unkind. Loyalty is a kind of faith. I think It is wrong to try and measure these things because measuring them means comparing the measurement of one to another.

I've been thinking about failure. It seems like suddenly everybody has decided that failure is not really a bad thing. That's what I also thought. One is a failure only at the point of capitulation. But now I have reason to disagree with that. Failure teaches us lessons, agreed. But not everything that teaches a lesson is a good thing. Here's an analogy: The cactus plant is beautiful, everybody agrees. But it is only beautiful to the eyes, it is not so beautiful that we should start touching it. The first time I touched a cactus plant, I learnt the bitter lesson. It's spore (not really spore but that's the best name I have for it at the moment) entered into my thumb and for days, it caused me tremendous pain and itching. I learnt a lesson by touching a cactus plant but just because it is a lesson doesn't mean it is a good one. Not all lessons are good. Failure is an example of a bad lesson. No matter how much we coat failure with bright colours and call it success in disguise and call it an opportunity, it is still failure and nobody truly wants to be associated with it. I hope we never find a way to make failure seem like a rad thing the way we've converted the word bad into excellent. Failure teaches you how not to fail again, but it is still a bad thing.

Going back to the earlier thought about whether or not I'm a good or bad person, I do not think any human being can be intrinsically bad or even intrinsically good for that matter. I think they are very relative, these terms. A bad person is bad to you because he wants the opposite of the things you want. Say you want world peace or an end to communism, for example; the fact that you want that does not necessarily make you a good person, in fact, it actually makes you a bad person to the communist or the terrorist, because he wants communism, he believes communism is the right way to go. And because he believes his own God will be ashamed of him if he does not kill infidels and people who do not reason like him, respectively. Do you understand? This is kind of complicated, I have never really thought about it.