Oluwatoyin,
What you have said here is very moving.
In this you are closer to the super-idealist dreamer John Lennon's Imagine
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
You invite the obvious corollary to your dream;
in the spirit of Satyagraha Mahatma Gandhi's
"Be the change you wish to see in the world"
( be the change you want to see in others) :
follow this progression:
according to the compass
charity begins at home
so here's the trajectory
of self-wishing fulfilment
to make Nigeria that dream
to make Nigeria greater than
ever before, by individual freedom
of choice and by not shirking the duty
of collective responsibility
to leave the option open to
reverse the brain-drain in
the service of which quest
you may even imitate your idol
Immanuel Kant who never left
Königsberg and just as Jesus
whose body walked on water
actually never left the Holy Land
(apart from a brief sojourn in Egypt)
before he returned to his father
in the heaven where he came from
hopefully so too you exploring every
corner of the cosmos in search of
the holy grail, more like Kant and less
like Chistopher Columbus you wont have
that wanderlust urge to travel all the way
to over there where they hope to find
the super real greener pastures in America
currently at position 24 in the world Happiness
index, although by the time Trump is through with
making his America great again (perhaps by
incorporating or annexing Gaza, Canada, Greenland,
the Panama Canal and the Federal Republic of Nigeria)
like Kant you will feel less of a need to travel anywhere.
At this point I wonder how that famous
Owerri motor park poet is feeling about Jesus
and Ojukwu, how he's feeling, and if he's capable
of expressing any poetic feelings about my late
Nigerian friends Sam Mbakwe and Mathias Offoboche
and when it comes to his visions in the field of comparative
demonology, if he is capable or incapable of entertaining
any revisionist ideas about Mr Hitler
the former president
of Bob Marley's Zimbabwe
who in his judgement, fell from grace
and thereby became a fallen hero - ah -
"and the soldiers who are dead and gone
if only we could bring back one"
But that's how it is,
through the mouth of Mark Antony
Mugabe's brother, William Shakespeare said
"The evil that men do lives after them:
the good is oft interred with their bones;
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju :
Not to worry too much about America
if you look at the Islamic Calendar for Ramadan
you'll see some joy and also much sadness too:
the history books' Iraq - where Imam Ali was assassinated
(the faithful prefer to say where Imam Ali was martyred )
that Iraq has suffered through many cycles of violence
to be where we are today…
I have never been there but I see the US as mine in terms of a vision of creative possibility.Elon Musk was one of my embodiments of such possibilities.
Why are these people destroying my dreams?
They are making nonsense of legendary institutions and values.
The right to hold and pursue views different from that of the government.
Some of the world's greatest institutions, such as elite US universities, are being recurrently humiliated and gutted of their inspirational essence.
Freedom of universities from ideologically driven government interference.
The presence of robustly funded academic systems, free from systemic shocks.
The US Presidency as a bastion of a degree of mature statesmanship even in the midst of evil US foreign policies.
The US as a global melting pot where people go for the opportunity to reach the stars.
All these are being destroyed.
These people are destroying my dreams.
It is not fair.
Every country is a geographical construct, an economic and cultural system, an interpersonal network and an idea or network of ideas.
The sense of identification with a nation enables those identifiers to"own the nation" in an imaginative sense, a metaphorical ownership not confined to citizens of that nation or even those who live there.
It is such a sense of "ownership" that has motivated migration to the US as a place where practically anyone may more readily maximize their potential in a liberal social environment than in other places, including the cultural ancestor of the US, Western Europe.
Trump's strategies imply the destruction of this image of the US
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