There Is Always A Price Tag… (In A World Short Of Good Examples And Precepts!)

I have adopted this title made popular by the masterwork of James Hadley Chase, the late detective fictionist and prolific novelist from America, who brandishes the artillery of unbelievable thrills and deadly suspense. By the way, lifting the James Hadley Chase title shouldn’t be misnomer, but, a thing welcomed under a literary license.

The world of today is stuck at the road junctions, with the choices of where to go. There is the widened and attractive road to perpetual destruction and then a permanent pain of regrets. There is also the narrow and stormy path filled with thorns and broken bottles. This, the holy books say is the road to righteousness and salvation. Follow this there are ‘wounds and blisters’, which would thereafter vanish without lumps and pains.

But, somewhere at this road diversion, there is always a man who would show others the way to go. To lots of people, this man may be called a Guide, but I would preferably call him Story Teller.

A master story teller, like the aforementioned James Hadley Chase, wouldn’t sway his listener if there is no assorted ingredient to cook his story with. Writing is in the similitude of the sweet honey comb that the dutiful bees have to traverse long distances to get.

A good story teller is a blender of the sweet and the bitter. He could paint a paradise in flowing colours; wave a basket around the stars of the galaxies; build a castle in the air; and bake the flying chocolates for the children to try to pick, midair. The good stories unite the world, vice versa. Story telling comes in types and from all the cultures of the world. But, a much desirable world should rightly be informed and moulded in the cast casted by the caster. A story teller is a mould or a cast.

There are story tellers by the camp fire; in the moonlight or somewhere else. He should build up the resolve of young and adolescents; to make life better than he met it. At home, schools, offices, trains, buses, ships and airplanes the story teller knows his onions to positively indoctrinate the others. There are motivational talks, books, television, radio, internet-telephone complements and audiovisuals for inculcation.

The story teller is even more active in the church, mosque, convents, bioscopes and television viewing centres. At school and other informal leaning centres, the story teller is more designated to ‘teach’ the learners. Even in the world of a journalist, journalism and the media, the reporter and his crew have to bring the news forward. Since the practice is to correctly inform, (and not to misinform), severe laws are in place, because the act of functional information spread is not to be left in the hands of mischief makers. Then, there is the gagging of the media’ by the same ‘usurpers’, in a bid to ‘horse-ride’ the public

But, some individual practitioners instigate ‘self-censorship’, where he prunes the story to suit himself.

The tendency is for the media to celebrate the bad news; because he believes that a news item is not worth it until ‘a man bites the dog’ and not when ‘the dog bites the man’. That is also why today’s social media of ‘report it by yourself’ has become the evil of self-pursuits by the public practitioners.

Also in today’s world, the family unit has becomes its topmost problem. Parents and guardians are no longer good story tellers. And where they to be would the children and wards listen to them, than they do to undue peer influences? Parents and guardians, instead of building the family front are lovers of themselves and the vane glories they pursue. Our world could be better off, with the restoration of the family system, which is a miniature of the entire world.

The world is in a dire need of directional ethical and moral re-orientation away from war, arms multiplications, espionage, economic sabotage, racial discrimination, organized crime and criminality, bloodletting, sexual perversity, religious bigotry and hatred etc.

There is always the need for inter-age and multiracial socialisation etc., with civic responsibility as the social order, where religious biases work against the unity of purpose amongst humans. That is to say that religion has failed mankind, where it spreads hatred between the various believers, than the need for universal brotherhood. Like the Crusaders of the Christian faith of the old, that forcibly convert or destroyed others, most worshippers of the Islam and some other faiths now spread violence in the name of religion. Ironically, the principle of Almighty God, the creator of mankind, is known to be one that is committed to the safety of man and his happiness. Religious fanaticism has spread over genuine intentions to heal the world. Instead of secularism, the doctrine that a nation must not adopt religion code as its law, the world is confronted with religious states and its spread, like the ISIS trying to create Islamic states in the Middle East etc. and the Boko Haram insurgents making to create a Caliphate in Nigeria. But the tone of creating more of theocratic states is a pointless armed struggle, vicious killing and maiming of the human lives, and destruction to properties. It also brings untold hardship, with the influxes of refugees, internally displaced persons and economic disorder.

Where the religious groups go astray to pursue the opposite, the worst would come from nations, who are at dagger-drawn to persecute fellow nations. At the global scale, not much seems to have changed, even though there are designate bodies and treaties, spelling sanity for humankind. The treaties are broken

with the slightest provocations, even by those same countries that pride themselves as the custodians of social order.

For instance, one would not understand while the cold war is again resurfacing between Russia and the West. Like the world which is now infested with war, terrorism, pestilence etc., Russia is at it promoting war with its Ukraine neighbour, as other superpowers exports weaponry and violence abroad. In Russia, instead of going to war like sipping the vodka, whatever happened to the liberal principles of Perestroika and Glasnost that the forefathers of Russia brought about to save their nation?. Is Vladamin Putin, the Russian president, angling for a third world war, like Adolf Hitler of Germany?

But, for one thing, virtues or evil does await every; every group of people; every nation; every block of nations etc. There is always a price tag or the law of retributive justice.

Conclusively, I am not highlighting in this column the usual reports and other contents of the specific edition. While it is intended, we urge you a happy reading of the first edition of your beloved Society Celebration