Re: Gentlemen of the road
Last week, I did a piece titled: ‘Gentlemen of the road’, I got this thought provoking response which I thought I should share with you. The response is reproduced below. I do hope you will find it interesting like I did. Read on:
Just read your beautiful prose this morning. It’s a masterpiece of the contemporary and a philosophical reminder that life is a stage and we all have varied roles to play in it – Some fast and very likely short, others slow and maybe long and yet some others just in between in varying degrees and of different durations. Yet, and I describe it, in positive terms, as an article to nowhere. To nowhere because given the aspect of the fast moving Lagos life you choose to illustrate your eventual philosophical conclusion, I expected, in conclusion, a terse lesson on traffic attitudes, courtesies and regulations.
However, the unspoken (or is it unwritten) lesson that emanates from your piece is that everyone must recognise the varieties of rights that life offers us. In choosing what category (whether fast, slow or moderate) we prefer to fall into, as individuals, we must respect the right of preference of others around us too. The man who chooses to be fast must exercise caution and respect time and speed limits in his haste so as not to ram or come into collision with and cause bodily or property harm to the man who is slow or moderate. The man who has chosen to be slow must maintain a slow lane and not get into the way and be an obstacle to the fast man in the fast lane in his chosen haste to arrive his destination.
Similarly, the moderate man, that man in between who ding-dongs between the fast and the slow and prefers to meander in between the slow and the fast lane, deciding when to do so, must do so with the utmost respect, caution and courtesy to both the fast and the slow. He must, when he decides to transit from the slow lane give adequate indication to the man on the fast lane that he is about to gradually meander onto the fast lane. In the same vein, he must also give adequate notice to the man on the slow lane should he decide that his sojourn on the fast lane is over and wants to move into the slow lane. But he must also watch out for the next moderates who will also be meandering in and out with him, perhaps in competition.
Anything short of these courtesies and cautions will frequent society with constant and daily “commotious” frictions in life as we now witness across Nigeria and, indeed, the world. As a matter of fact, the lack of respect of these niceties of courtesies and regulations is responsible for the madness of the very graphic example you chose to illustrate your philosophy – The commotion that has become the maddening Lagos traffic also aptly termed all motion, no movement!
In the end, your article remains the pretty piece that it is. It calls for the deep introspection of every reader and cautions that we must, at every point in time, individually and collectively, bear in mind and respect that we are all different and that our individual rights stop where our neighbour’s rights begin.
Oregon.associates@gmail.com
FUNKE OSAE-BROWN