The most pitiful category of people are dreamers, a set of people with immense creative imagination but without resources to make their dreams a reality. I once said, "what will the world be like without the ability to dream". The fact is, every development and innovative idea mankind is experiencing at every point in history was just an idea in someone's head, just a dream an individual was passionate about. It is also what makes dreamers pitiful because as time goes on, a person's passion for his/her dreams will begin to fade, especially when such a person experience continuous failures.
As a kid, I always knew I wasn't like everyone else. I wasn't born with any visible superpowers, in fact I was fragile and weak compared to the kids of my age. As if that wasn't bad enough, I also find it difficult to communicate with people, I always prefer my own company. It wasn't long before I was labelled a weirdo, it never actually bothered me because within me I knew there was something weird about me.
In the absence of physical strength, I had something else, which was my ability to think in ways kids of my age couldn't. Since I don't really go out and play with other kids, I guess I had more time to think about my life. When I say thinking, i know most people are capable of doing that but mine is a little detailed. Whenever I'm thinking about something or formulating a plan, I'm capable of creating visual images in my imagination of what is yet to be. As a result of this I was able to walk through my plans like it is already happening. With this, dreaming about stuff was like a walk in the park for me. Every one of my dreams is an abstract of my experience.
The first thing I was passionate about was becoming some kind of super hero, I mean every kid dreams about having superpowers but this not just about that. I was in a neighbourhood that felt like a crime city, a community in ketu. The rate at which hoodlums commit all kind of atrocities was gets higher every month. These crimes ranges from rape, drugs, kidnapping, robbery e.t.c within my community was still safe due to the measures every landlord in my community took to protect their lives and property.
The most annoying part of this was that, there are various police stations in my neighbourhood but they don't seem concerned about whatever was occurring. It was as if they intentionally chose to do nothing and it is rare to see any of the crimes committed in my neighbourhood on a newspaper. What ever occurred in my neighbourhood just dies there and the reason is because the crimes committed by this so called hoodlums are being covered by the politicians and wealthy men using them as a tool for destruction.
Corruption has been dwelling in the society for as long as I could remember, in a community where law and the enforcer were instrument of the rich, they were no principles. Power and authority belongs to those who weld it. Growing up in such an harsh environment, the only thing I could think of was how to make the world a better place or how to get out of there as soon as possible.
For years I thought of having superpowers, to rain wrath over the hoodlums and corrupt elite who had transformed the peaceful community to an era of tyranny. I dreamed about it for so long that it nearly felt like it was becoming reality. I remember trying different times to get bitten by a spider😅, maybe being a spiderman wouldn't be so bad but such fantasies has a way of fading away as time passes by. As my wishes of superpowers never came true I became hopeless, seeing how my community grew worse every day, I started hoping for other ways to put an ending to the injustice.
Eventually I noticed, in this so called community there was absolute spiral of silence, the voice of the masses had no worth while the atrocities committed by the elite was never spoken of. No one had the courage to speak up or expose their illicit crimes, knowing about this, song of hope came to my mind, becoming the whistle blower but as at then, I knew nothing about the name of such a profession, I had little knowledge.
lucky for me, I heard of a movie that became a trend in the boarding school I attended, the name of the movie was bridal mask, a Korean movie about a man with a mask and a sole purpose of fighting injustice and exposing hidden crimes, it sounds familiar to what I dreamt to achieve but it felt like being a bandit, which seem contrary to what I wanted. I wanted to do everything by the law.
By the time I was in SS1, I was aware of the name of the profession, A journalist, the whistle blower, the almighty warrior that fights battles with pen😅, though my mum had something else in mind for me but to cut the long story short, I ended up studying mass communication and I chose broadcast as my area of concentration. As soon as I finished my national diploma, it was compulsory that we all go for one year industrial training. As a mass communication student, A media organisation was the most befitting place to carry out my training, which was Lagos traffic radio.
Though I had moved out of the community but my passion was still intact. I worked as hard as I could to climb up the ladder in terms of authority in the hierarchical structure of a media organisation. From an ordinary editor in the news room, I became a sub-editor, an assistant to the senior editor in the news room, at last the dream is finally closer than I imagined but little did I know that corruption is a virus and media organisation is not immune to it.
To cut the long story short, the first time I witnessed injustice and decided to report it the way I saw it, I was suspended. I wrote a post about it, you can click the link to read more about the incident. I guess the moment I figured out I can barely make an impact if I keep working in a media organisation, I just gave up on becoming a journalist. It was like I didn't have the opportunity to pursue the career, I just couldn't cope with the way the media scrutinized the truth. Joseph Klapper said, all the media does is to engineer context.
This write-up was inspired by week 18 SciFi multiverse prompt "Childhood dreams" in SciFi multiverse community.
Cover image - 𝖣𝖾𝗌𝗂𝗀𝗇𝖾𝖽 𝗎𝗌𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖼𝖺𝗇𝗏𝖺
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