Cool or Not Cool – To be or not to be?

Hello people, your blogger is back with yet another odd topic with a strong message. Some things to note before reading:

1. This post if for young people

2. Young is any age you want it to be

What is cool? What is not cool? A very hard question to answer, if you ask me.

It’s so unfortunate that we live in a time and age where nobody really asks this important question and so we fall for anything believing its ‘cool’.

The dictionary won’t give us a modern definition of the word cool as relates to things we do but I’ll give it a shot.

In this first 2 decades of the 21^st century, we view cool as something to die for; something worth admiration; something worth reckoning with; something we want to emulate; something worth our energy investment.

Now that isn’t bad at all. It isn’t bad looking for things to emulate or be involved in; in fact it’s very good but when we pick useless things like we’ve been doing in recent years, then we begin to do stuff that are uncool in name of being ‘cool’. From the definition, it’s no wonder that celebrities rule the world in our day; they set the standards of cool and we follow them like sheep and do what they’re doing without even questioning if it’s cool or not. I find it very depressing that in this generation, we’ve lost the ability to question the intelligence of things.

Now that I’ve made my point, I would like to take us 100 years back. For those of us in Nigeria, 100 years ago is too far to have records but 80 years ago, let me tell you what cool was. Cool was being actively involved in the fight for independence. Cool was using the intellect you had acquired to play your active role in the aiding of and at the same time bringing down the Colonial Administration. For those in the Western World especially Britain and America, cool was leaving your family and even school to join the army. Cool was getting on mission ships loaded to Africa and come to educate our ancestors. Cool was inventing stuff and being the next revolutionists. If the concept of cool had been lost right from the beginning, there would be no internet, no television, no computer, no telephone, no Bill Gates and Steve Jobs with Microsoft and Apple respectively; all these things we enjoy now wouldn’t have been if the wonderful men and women of the 1980’s to 1999 didn’t know what cool was. In America, if the wonderful men and women of the 1950’s didn’t know what cool was, there would still be racial segregation in America, there would have been no Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcom X or Rosa Parks or Maya Angelou; these people although Americans are the reasons Blacks have voices today world-wide.

We live in a bad generation; technology has become so advanced that we have become complacent with the way things are. We no longer live with a war-time mind-set even though there are flames all around us, we live with a peace time mind set which is ironical. Technology has made us so satisfied we no longer think of how we can help, but we want to live in the moment till the chaos around envelopes us.

Cool is not being okay with the way things are and developing new and better things. Cool is not lying to ourselves that everything has been invented but finding new things or improving on those already invented.

Cool was MLK. Martin Luther King Jr. lived for only 39 years but by the time he died, he had a PH.D, a Nobel Prize and he played the key role in ending most of racial segregation in the America. America has had 44 Presidents of which more than half are dead but MLK not even a white talk more of a President has a public holiday every year celebrated in honour not just in America where it is celebrated officially, but unofficially in every other black nation.

Cool was Nelson Mandela choosing to spend 27 years in Prison, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana some years also, just to see their countries freedom.

Cool is Malala Yousofzai who won a Nobel Prize at just age 17. Cool is Nigerian Zuriel Oduwole who is currently travelling around the world as a public speaker. Cool is a young lady i follow on social media; Wadi Ben-Hirki who has a foundation and is fighting for various issues including female education. I follow a twitter page called Trends of Nigeria they advertise cool stuff from artists making various expert works from all types of materials to recently the video of a student here in Nigeria who made a drone and it actually flew and landed! Cool is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichiee and many other Nigerian writers who currently travels around speaking out on world issues.

But you and I reading this, what have we done? What have we done that is cool? Those of you reading this in your 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, what have you done that is cool? Those of you who are still young and agile, what do you plan to do that is cool instead of the nonsense of the 21^st Century? What mark have you made on humanity? There are plenty problems in Nigeria alone to solve but what are we doing? Do you know the uneducated majority will be our problems in the future?

There are some things I challenge seriously and wonder where we dropped our brains. I heard of this new clothing line by Kanye West – What do they do? They make clothes with rips everywhere and yet we spend 10’s of Dollars we could use for a better cause to purchase them. Excuse me, if you wear clothes torn everywhere what different are you from the poor almajiri boys and mad people we see in the market? Or even worst, what different are we from our 20^th Century ancestors who we regard as the uncivilized ones? Let me answer. The only difference between you and those almajiri boys is that while their clothes tore due to use, you bought torn clothes making you even madder!

I don’t listen to Nigerian music and it’s for a reason. Music is harmonic pleasing sound – Good music is music that teaches a message but the music in the Nigerian mainstream is something else. What’s cool about a song that has barely 6 lines of lyrics and no message with raucous videos displaying voluptuous content? No wonder the rate of immorality increase by the day! I don’t blame the artists though, it isn’t their fault. Anytime a new artist, a nobody with no connections tries to make a song with perfect sense and wonderful lyrics, they don’t sell; why? Because we don’t question our intelligence and automatically write them off. I have very few artists I respect in Nigeria people like Timi Dakolo, Waje, which kind because they know what it means to preach a message with your songs. From Dakolo’s totally sensible Love songs for his wife to Wajes new inspirational track Mountain that’s music and they’re doing something cool!

There’s gang violence everywhere in Chicago and artists like Lecrae and Derek Minor make music for this gang kids, to keep them out. That’s cool!

We watch movies every day and while some just keep with the so called ‘cool’ trends, others inspire us and leave us fuelled. That’s cool!

Black people are naturally talented people. All around the world black people are doing and have been doing revolutionary stuff but what are we doing? Why are we lying around mediocre when we were created to be meteoric?

I could ramble on and on about this topic but ill end here. I want you to think today. What could you possibly do that would leave a mark on humanity? What could you possibly do to create a change? What could you do that is cool?

Thank you for reading fam, i’ll see ya’ll next month!