Excuses and blaming someone else is becoming increasingly common, too. Students blame teachers for their failures, society blames the president for the economy, sad people blame God for their problems—it’s a “blame game” world. And, even more disappointing, the excuses are becoming less and less clever. Making an excuse is so common it’s rarely a second thought! People make excuses for why they are not following through with their commitments. Excuses like, “I just can't do it,” “I'm not smart enough,” et cetera. People make excuses for cheating on their significant other as if cheating is normal behavior; they say things like, “Everyone else does it,” or “It’s okay because I only did it once.” Since when has cheating ever been okay, even once?
People cheat on diets more than anything. They forget that cheating on oneself is the most unethical thing someone could do, next to quitting altogether. A person should never cheat, much less cheat on themselves! The mind is much stronger than we give it credit for. Ever heard of a false pregnancy? It’s where a woman believes she is pregnant without her actually being pregnant; her mind is so strong that her body actually changes to sustain a fetus which doesn’t exist! If the mind has the power to do that, then it is certainly strong enough to stop you from cheating on yourself or someone else. Once you quit or cheat in one area of your life, it’s that much easier to cheat in other areas of your life. Soon enough, you will do it everywhere. Do not let yourself fall into the downward-spiraling trend of cheaters.
CHAPTER 5:
Business Rules Happiness. Religion Rules Laws.
“What are we doing?”
This is the question I asked myself after one recent Thanksgiving, and the same question I asked myself after the 2012 Presidential elections. What are we really doing?
Take Christmas, for example. When most Americans think of Christmas, they imagine presents and the bustle of the heightened shopping season. Does a thought even come to mind about church, about the real reason behind Christmas, or why it is celebrated? Psychologically, someone reading this paragraph might find an excuse for why this does not apply to them, but I know this mentality is happening all across America because I see it happening to people around me. I’ve even found myself caught up in the commotion!
This is the sad state of the world we live in. Christmas has become business: it is shopping, guilt, selfishness, desire, lust, irritation, and gift-giving. Even worse: most kids growing up this day and age don’t know the origins of or the original concept of Christmas. Talk to anyone over the age of fifty who has long lived in America. They remember a time when they didn’t receive more than a handful of gifts for Christmas—maybe they did not get anything at all!—but they were still very happy with the little things they had.
Businesses, in an attempt to make profit and keep their private jets well fueled, have created a society were the main focus of all major holidays are not the actual holidays themselves but rather another opportunity to make money. Thanksgiving is not giving thanks anymore; no longer is it a time to simply enjoy having dinner with the whole family and reconnect while being grateful for being together. Nowadays, Thanksgiving has been converted to “the day before Black Friday, the best shopping day of the year.” In 2012, Thanksgiving day itself became part of the Black Friday itch—the holiday had become secondary to shopping! For a few years now, stores have been opening earlier and earlier; “after midnight” became a comfortable chant for retailers; after a while, stores felt it was okay to open even earlier than that. In psychological terms this phenomena is called Foot-in-the-Door Theory. It’s a concept which describes the slow, creeping intention of changing one thing into another without another person realizing it. In this case, the retailers put their “foot in the door” by starting to open at midnight on Black Friday, and then, when they saw that shoppers had adopted that concept, they went ahead and opened up to their true intention—having you leave your dinner table (and your family!) and get in line to buy more and more products which you probably don’t even need.
Though Christmas isn’t as corrupted as Thanksgiving, it has certainly changed over the years. In all of the weeks leading up to December 25th, you’ll see countless ads for things you “need” or “should” give to someone. Advertisers have colorful commercials that grab the attention of young children, marketing toys that they might have never known existed but now can’t live without. Commercials send subliminal messages to get kids believing that if they do not get a particular toy for Christmas, it means three things: first, that they will not be as happy as they would be if they had received the toy; second, that they are not as cool as their friends are (and their friends probably got the toy); and, third and most importantly, that their parents probably do not love them. This means that many parents are either forced to get the gift for the kid or suffer the tantrum that might follow. This relates to the next biggest problem.
Most parents nowadays do not like saying ‘no’ to their children, something that might stem from their parents saying ‘no’ too often to them or for other reasons, and so children end up getting anything they want. That means nothing negative in the short term but in the long term, this absence of ‘no’ would have changed the concept of Christmas to children forever: Christmas for the child has become the season for giving and receiving, for gifting and shopping, not the season for being happy you made it through the year and basking in the love of family.
Island Chapters: In Africa.
CHAPTER 1:
The Promised Land.
I have seen the Promised Land... and it's not America. The Promised Land is not a place where you're forced to live by the computer, to live at the will of Smartphones, to live glued to the TV, or to live at the mercy of other technologies. The Promised Land is not a place where people sit around watching other people live their lives on television shows. It is, rather, a place where people go out and work hard to achieve something unimaginable, to reach a goal they can be proud of and come home and tell their families they’ve accomplished it.
In my eyes, Africa is the Promised Land. It is the place where anything and everything is there for you, laid out for the taking, where everything and anything has been placed by God for people to live by. There are so many lush resources, so many intelligent people. There is such promise hiding there.
I see all this in Africa, but my vision is not the vision of the world. Africa will never be in real life the place I see with my mind’s eye. The world—with its slew of governments which are far more muscular than those in Africa—would be too negatively affected, economically and financially, and no one wants that. Africa is almost perfect but, thanks to industrialized nations like the United States, France, and Israel, among others... it will never reach perfection. It will always be stuck in last place, decades in development behind the others, highly dependent on foreign aid, its people stuck with a mentality of Learned Helplessness from which they don’t know how to escape. Africa is lost in the seventies: their cars are old, their houses are old, their clothes are out of date, and their technology is far behind.
Africa though blighted, is partly the victim of its own demise. From experience I know that entire populations in Africa are driven by greed. The man with the most money wins and takes advantage of the less fortunate—playing the “survival of the fittest” card—is only a piece of the puzzle. Dictatorship there is really bad; military power overrules the “good of the many”. American dollars speak loudly. Very loudly.
When I went there with my U.S. Passport in hand, doors opened for me that I didn’t expect would. Even though I was Cameroonian and I was known by most of the community, by just a flash of my passport I was allowed into places that my escorts, my African friends who had never left the country, could not go. All at once I felt heightened and hurt. I saw my African friends in a new light: the light in which, I felt, Americans saw me.
In addition to the political and technological plights, Africa, God's Promised Land, has become the world's test site for new military wea
pons, both biological and traditional. It is highly suspected that AIDS was not the result of some unknown jungle monkey’s bite, but the makings of the United States’ Biological Warfare Program. American slaves back in the 1800s came from the town where AIDS "originated". Therefore, if AIDS did “start” with these people, then wouldn’t the disease have been in America a very long time ago, before the Cold War? Why then, did AIDS appear during the time period when America and Russia were in the middle of a weapons race, when both Super Powers were out looking for the next big biological weapon?
When you really think about it, AIDS is the perfect weapon: it destroys the immune system and then leaves the person open to any small illness that can kill them. While this is just a theory, it makes sense because of the time frame in which all these things occurred. Of course, no one will admit to creating the worst disease (so far) that ever hit humankind.
I've learned by studying history that the governments are well known for blaming "less-than human" people for issues that they themselves have caused. (And, though some would like to directly accuse America only, we all know that this is not specific to the American government; governments, Nazi Germany for instance, have been doing this since as long as history has been written.) That's why when AIDS was “created” Africa was blamed—because it was easier to convince people that Africans were less than human than to tell the truth. Then, when AIDS came to America, gays were blamed for its spread, because gay people are less than human, undeserving, and abnormal.
Admittedly, I am no conspiracy theorist, and I do not hate the American government (quite the opposite, actually; there is much hope and love to be found here), but I do not like when someone gets blamed for something they did not do.
Africa has also fallen victim to severe resources depletion. Africa has diamonds, timber, hunting, fishing, rain forests, agriculture, ivory, people, gold, silver, copper, and is source to some of the most interesting history on the globe. Centuries of export with little to zero imports have left the resources dry and the prices of goods inflated (or deflated, depending on which direction those resources are going).
But, after all this consistent exportation, the Promised Land has become weak. Africa as a great resource was crippled long ago by so-called religious men who went to bed lying to themselves that they did a good thing. And there are still people today who commit the same crimes as in ages past, whether it is poaching or blood diamond dealing or slave trading. They might tell themselves they do it to better the world or to help their communities, but, one day, those people will have to admit their greed and selfishness. They will have to admit that they did it, not for the good of humanity or for some other charitable cause, but for the money.
God created the world in seven days, and Africa was inhabited since time began before becoming what we see today. God created an almost perfect piece of land and gave us, human beings, opportunity to take care of it, appreciate it, and live on it and by it. But we, in turn, have destroyed it.
By now Africa has been beaten, raped, and cried for someone to listen. But no one cares enough to listen and search for the problem or the solution. We, “intelligent” human beings survive in a global community we know so little about. And it's funny how no one seems to notice a troubled neighbor and, if they do notice, they don’t seem to care enough to take action.
We are a people who are quick to hate when given a single insignificant reason. We go to bed believing we are caring, loving individuals. We do not hesitate to go to war if another country makes a political statement towards us, citing the protection of the land we live on as a reason for doing so. But no one seems to care about the amount of waste we put into the earth, the amount of pollution we put into the air, the amount of bullshit we put into our hearts.
Humans have failed. We aren't working hard at creating major solutions to the problems. Instead, we are working hard creating the new iPhone. We aren't busy fixing the small problems we were assigned by God to fix; we are busy making more! We aren't trying to become one big, global community that is civil and united on the fact that we are all just humans. No, we are busy creating new divisions and building fences to separate ourselves even more. Ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and place of birth have become reasons for us to discriminate against each other rather than use them as a chance to learn more about the people in the world we do not know about, to learn about their experiences, and to unite in their differences.
America is the country where anything is possible. Still, it’s a land whose people think primarily of money, just like they do in Africa. (Oh, how similar we are!) It’s a place where kids in school are left to eat unidentifiable food and where now more than ever before people are questioning whether their food originated from an animal, a farm, a factory, or a test lab. Americans grow up eating food that makes them sick and they don’t even know it; food that causes them to acquire allergies, speeds aging, and weakens their immune systems; they are forced to rely on overpriced drugs and other medications to help them survive illnesses that those medications (and foods) caused in the first place. But… it's all about the money right? The money no one seems to have.
Africa went from being the Promised Land given to us by God to the world's communal landfill. AIDS, biological weapons, dangerous pharmaceuticals, and other things are tested there because, unlike America or other developed countries, there is almost no way for those people—my people—to tell the world about what is happening to them. Africans have no voice. And because they—we—have no voice, the problem persists. That is why I’m working to be a voice for my people. That is why this book exists.
If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a chemical bomb is tested in my town and I do not survive to tell the world about it, did it really happen?
For information on these claims, visit:
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/pentagon_aids.htm,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discredited_HIV/AIDS_origins_theories, and
http://conspiracyinsider.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-african-zombie-disease-bio-weapon.html for interesting reads.
You can also read about one of Africa’s unexplainable, “natural” disasters at:
http://www.dibussi.com/2006/08/the_lake_nyos_d.html
http://natgeotv.com/uk/killer-fog/videos/tragedy-at-lake-nyos
CHAPTER 2:
Man-Made Conflict.
There is quite a lot of conflict in Africa. Much of which have been made into popular movies like Hotel Rwanda, and Blood Diamonds. But the big question people always have is this: why do you people fight each other? This question puzzles millions of intelligent people, and quite frankly, it almost seems crazy to me that the answer is not known worldwide. The answer can be explained with one simple question: how do you control a whole country full of people who outnumber you?
The answer: you make them hate each other.
This is what the European leaders did to control their colonies. They created an environment where the people in each area did not trust the other and they made it so that the people relied on the Europeans to keep them apart and keep the fights from breaking out. Now, this “divide and conquer” system works wonderfully for everyone… until the people keeping the peace leave the country, and no one is there to keep the peace anymore. At that point, any two opposing sides are left with no clarity on who is the leader or who is in control of the country. So they end up fighting over it, and will not stop until they have a clear winner/leader.
This is what has happened to most of Africa. The French and English left and with their departure began the battles that cause African suffering. It’s commonplace for me to be asked if the blood diamond trade is still going on in Africa, but it’s rare for people to understand that Africa is not a country: it is a continent made up of many individually recognized countries! The conflicts the continent has undergone and is still undergoing makes for a very hostile environment and paints a
negative picture in many people’s minds of what Africa is actually like.
THE END.
“I am not afraid of the end of my book.
I’ve had a lot of great stories, characters, and events.
When it all ends, I’ll be thankful for everything.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Born November 12, 1993, in the small village of Ndop in Cameroon, Africa, Wenceslaus (Wen) Muenyi is the youngest son of Moh Triya Muenyi, once mayor of Ndop, North West Division, and Grace, his mother and shining hero. At the age of nine, he and his siblings traveled to the United States to be with their mother, who suffers from persistent cancer and who came to the U.S. to receive treatment for her illness.
Wen currently studies Computer Science and Marketing at the University of West Florida. He plans to eventually return to Cameroon to help improve the living conditions and opportunities for the people there.
Wen may be contacted directly at: [email protected].
You can read more about Wen at:
http://www.wenceslaus.me
Prior to the creation of this book, Wen made a YouTube video for his mother, as a tribute to her passion, strength, and perseverance. That video can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkJq4GyopPk.
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