Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.

Help me out a little here. I am trying to understand what exactly people want. On the one hand, the Americans now have a president who promises greater transparency, accountability and change from the bottom up, and he’s taken some pretty drastic steps to move in that direction. On the other, you have a hungry media, desperate for a story that will point out his fallibility – all through the campaign, the bane of their existence was that they simply could not find anything that he could do wrong.

So now, there are two nominees that have stepped down of their own volition, and have also taken responsibility for messing up on filing their tax returns. Obama has also stated openly today that ‘he screwed up’. The press have decided to put this out there as impending doom for Obama's administration. They owned up and apologised and took responsibility for God's sake!!!! What more do you want??? IF they've stepped down, it's because you morons would have harped on it till kingdom come, and distracted everyone from the real issues!!

For me, it doesn’t get much better – who the hell said it was going to be a perfect process – when you have a system that has been running on bullshit for so long, how the hell does one expect everything to fall into place all at once.

Perhaps the republicans can be excused for taking up the mantle of bashing the new administration. Their defeat was a very bitter pill to swallow, and it takes a great human being to take humiliation sitting down – and we know there are no great republicans.

But the media – well now – if they don’t get that they would serve a far more noble purpose by focusing on the positive things that are coming out of this upheaval, then they have, once and for all missed the point. But of course, the story is always bigger than the larger welfare of the Whole.

Yes the global economy is in a meltdown, and yes millions are losing their jobs, and yes, everyone is being forced to re-think how they live. But who the hell said that real change was going to be easy?????

Selfishness and self-serving lifestyles have been the norm for the longest time, and somewhere along the line, it became acceptable to live off money you didn’t have and wanted things that you couldn’t afford. Banks, corporations and celebrities have all been central to propagating a system that has woven an illusionary consumerist fantasy of what it means to be wealthy. And the people have allowed it.

So now, the illusion has revealed itself to be exactly that – and people are realizing that their dreams are not even made of paper, and it’s been about an electronic house of cards. And everyone is going down whining.

Because it’s been about top-down domination, it is no wonder that the ones to suffer the most are the ones from the middle down. The ones at the top may worry about their failing system, but they’re not the ones who are worrying about how they are going to feed their families. And so they will ask for quick solutions to jump start the system again. After all, the electronic illusion can be easily manipulated to weave an even more fantastic story of ‘how to become rich’ – all you need to do is wave the wand a little differently.

We can either look at this as a disaster, or we can look at this as a tremendous opportunity. For the ones who have lost their jobs or homes, if they allow their new president to take them down a different path, a path that was perhaps traveled down in the past but forgotten about in the last two decades, then they will see that it may take a while, and it may be painful for a bit, but the rewards will be far greater, more solid, and certainly more tangible than anything they can expect from the current system.

So he was right when he said it was going to be about patience, and sacrifice and humility.

And this is not just for America – this is time for global re-assessment, to reexamine and to question what it is that we truly hold dear, of what is and always has been sacred for us.

This is not going to be a time of band-aid solutions, nor is it going to be one of fitting into the old status quo – we are going to have to go as far as to even re-define our definition of success and to identify those values that bring us together as a collective and not separate us through our differences.

There is no stopping of this snowball that has started its downward descent. We either prepare ourselves now, at the bottom of the hill, or around it as it makes it way past us, and perhaps try to prepare ourselves for what we think the picture is going to look like when it settles wherever it decides to.

If I were to list out the number of things going wrong for us here in Kenya, the list itself would be the size of an average blog post. But I have decided that I am going to dispense with focusing on what’s going wrong – I am instead going to lend my energy to those people who refuse to take things sitting down, and who are working tirelessly to expose the selfishness, corruption and in efficiency – Bunge la Mwananchi, Youth Agenda, Partnership for Change, to name a few.

It is going to be from within the system (yes, there are a few good people on the inside who perhaps need to be supported as they challenge the status quo of the existing system), and without, with the action of the groups that I mentioned above that we are going to bring about the changes for our collective future.

It is going to take time, a hell of a lot of hard work, diligence, persistence, sacrifice and determination to get us where we want to go. And it is not going to be easy. But the days of sitting back and whining and complaining, of complacency and despondency, of handing over our power to the elitist few who never has our best interests at heart in the first place, ARE OVER.

I looked back at all the blogs that I have posted over the past year, and I realised that I have pretty much repeated myself in quite a few of them.

If I could put it all down in a simple paragraph then it would be this:

Start to take responsibility for yourself and for those around you.
Practise generosity – of mind, of temperament, of your time and of your resources.
Be mindful of how your presence on this planet affects it – you are not here simply to take but also to give back and to contribute.
Define what success means for you – I’m willing to bet that money isn’t one of your top priorities.
Don’t compromise on your core values – when you do so, you only rob yourself of a little more dignity, integrity and self-respect.
Have the courage to define life and its rules for yourself, based on your core vales.
Don’t give your power way to your so-called leaders – they are after all, only human and just as if not more fallible than you.
Spread dignity – in uplifting someone else, in honouring them, in acknowledging their existence, you exalt yourself.
Look after yourself, and your family, and your community – sometimes, sharing yourself is infinitely better then sharing your resources.

Don’t give up – I’ll be damned if I do.