Ethiopia: Crazy World – Crazier Times!

It has been some time now since this world started taking all the wrong turns it should have avoided, if conventional wisdom meant anything.

It seems a world that is going off the radars with such speed it seems to have lost the way back to the more sensible days where reasoning had leverage where it should if not all the time. A single evening news of the world would surely cause you some lost sleep if you’re the type of guy who reads things between the lines. In the ‘narrative strategy’ currently being employed probably everywhere the real news, the real story isn’t what is actually being said all those flamboyant words and terms thrown at you. Perhaps the better way to go about it if you really are after the real story with all its comas and semicolons, you might have to scratch between the lines until your fingernails change color!

One unfortunate reality of our times is that there is so much sugarcoating going on when it comes to news or stories of what supposedly happened, is happening, or would happen elsewhere it is easy to be hoodwinked into believing what you shouldn’t have. “What I thought would never happen is happening, and in big ways too!” Aha! There you’re. One ‘believer’ in, more to come! Isn’t that all there is to the game. Getting as many ‘believers’ and ‘converts’ as possible for your cause, if indeed there is any cause!

We’re still fixated on what is happening across the Atlantic. Many things we would have never suspected to happen in that part of the world seem to be happening, and the ripples spare no one and don’t seem to show any mercy, too! We’re talking to our compatriots as much as we can because this time it’s an issue which seems to knock every other Ethiopian door. How are you doing?” “Have they come to you in any way?” “Are you afraid that you’d be targeted for one reason or another?” Our questions are endless; their answers could have been endless if they had known a few of them. It seems despite them being where all the unthinkable is happening and we being thousands of kilometers away we seem to be in the same boat when it comes to seeking answers to even the smallest number of questions. Too much political bickering going on and that isn’t making it easy for the rest of the world to form any ideas which we can float around.

Take the student visa cancellation waves that have gripped America.

Is this happening in America of all places? Hundreds of foreign students having their welcome thrown out of the window followed by they, themselves being thrown out even as trivial an offense as an old traffic ticket. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not reporting or anything like that. I’m just trying to paraphrase what is floating all over the news media and the social media.

Now, I’ve to say this is one issue where coming to conclusions would be one of the worst missteps one could take? I mean. How could you come to conclusions when, at least for now, there is no way of getting the whole story with all the plastic surgery, pedicure and manicure, carpet-painting the entire narrative is given a whole lot of facelift? Look, though there are those of us who seem to have a couple of ideas about the American press what we’ve been seeing since election time even since earlier times has given us much more insights. And they are not good insights. You try to watch the same news in different channels and you’d be pardoned to think they might be talking about different countries. A couple of the biggest channels about important news of the day and you would think they are talking about different countries! And on top of the uncovered, shamelessly open hatred between the news media calling themselves as organizations to provide the real news as it happened without fear or favor. “We report the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” really!

One thing we have come to discover is that without probably having the slightest idea we might have been taken hostage by thoughts none of which are our original thoughts in the first place. We thought that they have gone in through one ear and come out through the other. Well, we’re wrong! Not all that goes in comes out! Many times than not we catch ourselves red-handed rooting for the most horrible ideas and thoughts no one their right minds should stand for! And what makes things worse of that you come to find out the fact once have been stuck on only one side of the stories as there is this tendency to stick to the same channels day in day out. No wonder that country which is the dream home of probably more than half the world so polarized in ways that we wouldn’t have expected from the most powerful and richest country in the world. Well it is their country and they and only they know what should be done. But then when we see it seems to have become more about personalities rather than policies we might pat you back. So, I thought I was the dumbest guy on this planet, and thanks I finally realize there far more of us than I would have thought!”