When we talk about corruption and other vices that bedevil our nation, we just think in terms of the civil service. It is like the public officers are really dirty and everybody else is clean. The media, especially, cannot be partakers in corruption or other acts of lawlessness, it is generally believed. Nothing can be further from the truth. Our entire society is, for want of a better word, filthy. Clean individuals among us are the exception rather than the rule. The public officers that we lampoon so much for being anything but clean are simply a reflection of the society. Lawlessness is deeply rooted among us, sad to say.
A few days ago, I conducted a simple survey to find out the extent of our lawlessness. I used the motor cycles on our public roads as an indicator of this. Driving from home, close to the Nancholi Filling Station, to Blantyre Mission (HHI), I decided to count the number of motor cycles I would meet on that route and note how they were operated. I came across 55 motor cycles in all. 11 of them were operated by motorcyclists that had crush helmets on; on 8 of them, the motorcyclists had helmets but not their passengers; the operators of 36 motorbikes did not bother to wear helmets, either themselves or their passengers. I also noticed that most of the motorbikes did not have any number plates. Besides, whenever I drive at night, I come across many motorbikes that do not have headlamps or any source of light on them. It is anything goes in the motorcycle world. This, I would be quick to point out, is a mirror of our society.
What the heck is the matter about motorcyclists trying to eke out a living by doing what they do? Some readers may ask. Does it really matter if a person on a motorbike wears a helmet or not? The short answer to this is that it matters. A lot! When he was on internship at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in 2019 through to 2020, my son would spend time in the Emergency Section of the hospital. He used to dread Friday nights in that section because higher than normal numbers of casualties used to be brought in on Friday nights. Nearly half of the casualties would have fallen off motor bikes and sustained varying degrees of injuries. Many of those injuries would affect people’s heads, which would have lacked the protection of helmets.
In defense, the motorcyclists will probably say that they cannot afford helmets or getting their bikes certified. They are too poor for that. And I can visualize some of my readers nodding in agreement. Frankly, anybody who can afford to buy a motorbike should be able to buy the necessary accessories that go with it, including having it properly registered. Further, a little discipline would enable the operators save a bit of money that can be spent on helmets or registration or motorcycling lessons. A good number of these operators drink. With a little discipline they can refrain from their beloved drink for some weeks and save money for the accessories.
It may well be that the survey described above does not succeed in getting you horrified at our society and you keep shoveling the problem to other people as a result. Psychologists call that self-serving bias: the tendency to blame everything and everybody else apart from yourself for the development of anything negative. It is like God putting the responsibility for eating the forbidden fruit on Adam, and Adam shoveling the blame onto Eve, who in turns shovels it to the serpent. The problem is always somebody else, not me.
Traversing through life, I have learnt that people are not as blameless as they appear to be, even more so in this country. A few years ago, I was unpleasantly surprised by what a lady I had always respected as one guided and living by sound Christian principles did. She wanted to send her daughter abroad but the daughter did not have the right academic qualifications. This lady was willing to get forged documents for her daughter so that she would getter a better chance of admission to an educational institution in the country she was travelling to. Obviously she did not see anything wrong with that. The truth is that thousands of people do similar, nay worse, things without so much as feeling remorseful about their acts. It is normal, they reason.
Our sense of normality has moved several notches downstream. Many things that are considered normal today would have been frowned upon thirty or so years ago.