One sad truth I have come to learn about life is that men are never perfect, not even the best of us. History just tells a story about a person, and our head fills in the blanks and tries to think they were all perfect in their lifetime. This makes us hold them in very high esteem, higher than they would have been if we truly got to know them in their lifetime. It took me a lot to accept this truth, it took me a lot to understand that there are really no saints around like we have been raised to think and those who do good are just normal people trying to do something good not because they do not have bad sides, but because they want to try improve the world and improve lives irrespective of their bad sides. Some of them might not even be trying to do good, some may have been so wicked but because on the outside it looks good, that is what the world got to know and their true character was never seen.
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You know what they say “Never meet your Heros”. There was this person I had always admired growing up, he looked every bit the father I wished I had, I always wanted to learn from him and he taught me a great deal of some of the lessons I still practice to this day. But then I realized he was still just a man when I discovered he had extra marital affairs because his wife did not live in the same state as he does. He was asking a divorcee whom I knew very well then because I was close to her kids and at the same time sleeping with his secretary who was my friend. The knowledge of this made me doubt every principle he ever taught me as a man and made me lose respect for him, but looking back now I realized that although there was nothing to justify what he did, he was just being a man.
I came to understand this after years of being with people and seeing them try to walk on themselves, and at the same time seeing them struggle with a lot of things. Society in itself puts a certain level of pressure on people and has a certain level of expectation for them assuming who they should be without realizing that at the end of the day, they are merely flesh and blood and would make the mistakes any ordinary person will make. If a person has done something worthy of honor, I believe they deserve to be horned in that regard. If their character is to be questioned then it should be as a point of lesson to others but not diminishing their act of service because if it were that easy to pull off whatever they did, then no one would be talking about it. Honor is a reward for hard work, and it should be given as a reward for hard work. Even we who celebrate or criticize them have characters people will not find good, therefore let’s all cut them some slack and appraise the work while we also expose the character and teach the coming generation to do better character wise.
THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 204 EPISODE 2
