Opinion
A Mirror of How Bad Our Society Has Deteriorated
I have no problem with what happened between the Senator and the young Polytechnic students who paid him a courtesy visit. My worry is not so much about the incident itself, but about the kind of society the incident mirrors back to us.
There was a time when an act of affection such as holding a child’s hand, carrying a child, or showing warmth and kindness to a young person of the opposite sex would hardly have raised an eyebrow. No political controversy would have been manufactured around it. No one would immediately have attached a sinister interpretation to an otherwise innocent gesture. But something has changed.
The problem is not necessarily the act. It is the stained lens through which our society has learned to see.
We have become a society in which innocence is increasingly viewed with suspicion. A harmless expression of warmth can quickly be interpreted as inappropriate. A simple gesture of affection can become evidence of something darker. And this suspicion is particularly intense whenever children are involved.
Gone are the days when relatives, neighbours, teachers, elders and other adults could simply be seen through the lens of trust and innocence. That innocence has been seriously eroded. Today, even parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and other trusted adults are not entirely free from suspicion.
Why? Because society has given us reasons to be suspicious.
Every day, we hear disturbing stories of parental abuse, sexual abuse, molestation and exploitation of children by people who were supposed to protect them. Some of these abuses happen within families and communities where trust should have been strongest.
So, perhaps, the mind of the average person has been conditioned to look beyond the obvious. It sees a touch and asks, What else could this mean? It sees closeness and wonders whether there is something hidden behind it. It sees affection and immediately considers the possibility of abuse.
This is the tragic psychology of a society that has been repeatedly wounded. I am not accusing the Senator of having any ulterior motive. That is not my argument. Neither am I suggesting that every public expression of affection should be interpreted as misconduct. But I would fault him for something else: not reading the room.
Public figures, particularly politicians, live under an unusually powerful microscope. They must understand not only their intentions but also how their actions may be perceived in a society where trust has been badly damaged.Good intentions do not always protect us from bad interpretations.
There is therefore a lesson here for everyone, especially those who occupy public office: be streetwise. Read the room. Understand the psychology of the society in which you operate.
We live in an increasingly sexualised culture, where ordinary human interactions are often interpreted through sexual optics. When a politician or any public figure displays unusually close, warm or physical affection toward someone who is not their spouse particularly a young person the public may not necessarily interpret the gesture the way the person intended it. That does not mean the public is always right. It means the public perception must be understood.
We must, however, be careful not to allow our justified vigilance against abuse to destroy every possibility of innocent human affection. A society that has become so suspicious that kindness itself looks dangerous has a deeper problem than the incident before us.
We need to protect our children without criminalising innocence. We need to remain vigilant without becoming paranoid. We need to expose abuse without assuming that every gesture is abuse.
And perhaps, above all, we need to ask ourselves a more uncomfortable question: What has happened to us that we can no longer look at innocence without searching for guilt? That, to me, is the real story behind this incident. It is a mirror. And what the mirror is showing us is not very beautiful.
Jarlath Uche Opara
jarlathuche@gmail.com