PRIDE GOES BEFORE A FALL

IS PRIDE A SIN?
According to the seven deadly sins, PRIDE is regarded as the sin from which all other sins arise.
So, what is pride?
There is a plethora of words and statements defining pride;
1. A feeling of honour and self-respect; a sense of personal worth
2. Excessive self-esteem; conceit
3. Satisfaction or pleasure taken in one's own or another's success, achievements, etc.

This is just one way of understanding the meaning of the word PRIDE and I am using it because it suits my understanding of the word. So far, I don't see anything wrong with being proud. So, how can Pride be a sin? Well, I think one has to understand what a sin is before one can understand the relation between pride and sin, and just like PRIDE; there is a plethora of defining words and statements

What is a SIN?
1. To commit an offense or violation or a transgression of a moral law, especially when deliberate.
2. Theology
a. Deliberate disobedience to the known will of God.
b. A condition of estrangement from God resulting from such disobedience.
3. Something regarded as being shameful, deplorable, or utterly wrong.

I have deliberately chosen this definition for one reason, to emphasize my argument against a God. So, let us all cut the crap of this pink/colorless man with a long beard who religious people revere as their God. For fuck sake, grow up human beings because there is no such a thing as a God with a human face what ever colour you imagine he is. Well, if there is a God who is human but not part of us, how come we blindly accept what is said he is; ‘I am the beginning and the end?' What is the beginning and the end for a person? Is it not birth and death? So, where does this bearded man begin and end in my life? In godly terms therefore, this means there is no association between pride and sin as there is no bearded man – these words become a vacuum, meaningless.
As for the morale law, who sets these moral standards of wrong and right? How about a preview of how religion is used in this case? A thief who stole to feed his children gets his hands chopped off whereas the very same people who are behind this morale law slaughter thousands of innocent people in the name of God. What is shameful, deplorable or wrong about a woman who is accused of committing adultery in a society where men easily access the services of prostitutes or where the religious highest order will protect their employees that sodomise and rape children in their care?

Let me get back to pride as it applies to me: I have no problems with pride where someone has worked hard to achieve that feeling or emotion.
1. A feeling of honour and self-respect; a sense of personal worth
3. Satisfaction or pleasure taken in one's own or another's success, achievements, etc.

But I have a problem with excessive self-esteem; conceit; because one needs an audience or other people who will be used as comparison. There comes this attitude of ‘I am better than you’ which automatically infringes on the self esteem of the others. Still, there is no morale wrong unless force is used to make the others lose their self esteem in comparison.

I will attempt to analyse what pride means as I understand the word:

Scenario 1

Florence Durrant has achieved her dream. She is married to a well educated white man and with him she has bought a 5 bedroom house in Kent, regarded as the garden of England in the whole of the United Kingdom. She has also educated herself to a position of power and as a nurse she proudly shows off some of her friends as doctors, consultants, surgeons, company directors and the like of all colours and backgrounds. She travels all over the world as when she wants to and buys all her cosmetics and perfumes at duty free. Surely, there is no reason for this Florence not to be proud, so Florence happily shows off her pride and the reasons why she is worth it.

Scenario 2

This is Florence who is her mother and lives in a remote little village in Africa and is deprived of the basic needs. She works 24/7 and yet she has nothing to show for it. She is proud of her children and spends every little penny she has to educate them. Her mentality is that she wants her children’s lives to be better than hers. She is married to a black man who has a dream but because of his colour, he will never fulfill his dream of being a successful business man. His dream is shattered under apartheid South Africa and to make ends meet he works for another black dreamer who has a store and employs him as an amateur tailor. He excels in doing this job that he had never done before, hence becomes best pals with his employer who pays him peanuts. He works so hard for sixpence and gets disillusioned and with the help of his employer he also becomes self employed buying and selling livestock at a fraction of a profit. But a penny profit is ok for him rather than being called a gardener or tailor by another man. Florence is proud of this man who is her husband, but she cannot take pride in herself; because as a black woman, she cannot help her husband achieve his dream. Two lost souls punished by the universe purely for the colour of their skin. Despite all this, Florence is proud of her achievement, as her hard work is reflected by the success of her children.

Scenario 3;

I have just come back from Kings College hospital in London where my white husband, who is now my ex husband has just had an operation on his back. I love him dearly and after 17 + years together, I cannot think of anyone closer to me, apart from my son than he is. One major reason that he is my ex is because he refused to acknowledge the Florence who is my mother; the Florence without whose hard work and sacrifice there would not be a successful Florence who is me. This is the Florence who never bought herself a dress but got hand me downs from her sister who worked as a nanny to a white family in the local town. Even then, the dresses were a third hand me down, as her sister also got them from her employer. How would Florence my mother have felt to hear these words from my ex regarding her home that she took pride in: “I cannot go where there is no running water and flushing toilet.” I believe her self esteem would have been knocked to zero and that is exactly how I felt, because that is where I was born and brought up and where me and my mother lived; i.e. where my history is buried.

Bless his soul because when I took my ex husband to my mother’s grave in town, he cried when he saw the dilapidated state my mother’s grave was in, and for that reason he accused me of being irresponsible. After the two of us spent hours looking for my mother’s grave as there was no gravestone, he turned round and said to me, ‘I will not let Zulu our dog’s grave be as neglected as you have done your mother’s grave.’ My father and my living brother had used their African culture whereby male siblings are responsible for their parents and decision making to stop me from building a tombstone for my mother, with my father personally accusing me of being big headed when I argued with him over this issue. This was despite the fact that my mother had been dead for 17 years and my brother kept promising my father that he would build the tombstone. The fact is that both my father and my brother knew that unless I did it, no one else would. This is where my white ex husband becomes a champion because he said to me; “I don’t care what your father believes in, I don’t care about what your brother thinks, but I will never allow our dog’s grave to be as neglected as your mother’s grave.” That same year I built a simple grave for my mother. I named our dog Zulu after my mother. She chose me in 1996 when we went looking for a black Labrador. Like my mother she was neglected when we got her at a kennel in Peterborough in United Kingdom where my in-laws lived. She died in October 2008 and her ashes are still on our mantle piece above the fireplace and every month I put fresh flowers by her box, something I never did this for my mother.

Now, in the ward where my ex husband is, were two other men with similar back problems,; one a white guy of my ex husband’s age whose operation was a success and another a man from Ghana who is nearly crippled by his back problem because there is nothing that his consultant can do that will help. It was a great relief for me to see my ex husband walking with little or no pain 2 days after the operation. I am talking here of a man who has been disabled for the past 6 months, he could not walk because of pain. Let me give him credit again; for the 5 plus months he has been laid on his back, the only gripe he gave me was because of his pupils. “What if the teacher who takes over my tutor group is crap? What if my tutor group gets affected by my being away from them; and what if all the teachers the school get are not up to scratch?” This is my ex husband in his passionate stand for his pupils, the passionate stand he failed to give his own wife; hence I divorced him. Yet when I visited him today, I was the only person he was looking forward to seeing because he had lined up all these questions that he could not ask the nurses or the doctors. I suppose this is because he trusts my judgement and knows that I will tell him the truth. We had a really good laugh and I enjoyed chatting to the other two guys as well and answered their questions. The white guy who was in the same ward took for granted that I was my ex husband’s wife, and chatted away about his wife. But it was the paralysed black man who made me open up because he asked me if I was Mrs. to my ex. Seeing his alone ness I said ‘Yes’. In return he said “What a lucky man because my wife who is nurse does not understand why I am mad because of my physical disability.” It is obvious that he had been watching me from the moment I arrived. Little did he know that what he saw was me whether visiting an ex or a friend? That is where I defeat PRIDE! I wear what ever hat is appropriate at any given time. With my professional friends, I take the professional stand. With my ordinary friends, I take our ordinary stand, and likewise I take the stand of those in my little village when ever I am with them. There is no pretence, there is no ego, there is no conceit and there is no self esteem. My simple philosophy is that; ‘The higher up you are, the harder you fall.’ Hence I am always level with the ground to lessen the impact should my fortune change the successful Florence the nurse to the poverty stricken Florence who is my mother.

Well, there is the other side of pride, where someone has too high an opinion of oneself like in those cosmetic adverts where someone’s image has been polished to look like they are the best thing since slice of bread. The aim behind that is to sell the product that is claimed to have achieved the looks portrayed. There is an element of a morally wrong act here, but only if people believe the advert and spend money on it only to find that it does not give them the looks of the airbrushed model. I also remember a farewell speech from one of my teachers when I qualified in one of my many courses; ‘You have got your certificate now, but the world out there does not revolve around certificates, it revolves around competition and you must learn to be sharp.’ I never knew what she meant until I started working and realised how quickly the pride I felt for passing my exams soon disappeared. I am not knocking those who have worked hard to achieve what ever degree or status they are proud of as I also fall in that category. What I am knocking is this wrong where someone thinks that just because one has that certificate or that position that someone else does not have, then, those that don’t have must follow behind like lemmings. I believe therefore that, this is the pride regarded as the sin from which all other sins arise. In my experience, those with such a mentality will do anything to have the audience whose self esteem they tread on so as to perpetuate their feeling of PRIDE. This is not a religious, political or class travesty, it is a mentality that is embedded in human mind and all of us are capable of doing the same, but some of us choose not to. Hence we get trodden on.
So, if you want your neck broken, tread on my toes is my philosophy simply for this reason; I hate proud people end of!