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There are a thousand and one reasons for man to be thankful. We have a super-good God who created us gratis, gifted us a great earth complete with the paraphernalia of life and generally protects and provides for us like a hen does her chicks. Imagine we had to pay for oxygen. Imagine we had to go to another planet to get food, clothing and shelter.
There’s every reason to be grateful to God. Alas, is man? Even man to man, 80 to 20, there are more reasons for gratitude than ingratitude. Man has developed the earth more than he tends to destroy it. Imagine the earth was still without void, form or shape; all that darkness; imagine we had no roads, no aeroplanes, no electricity, no hospitals, no schools; just imagine we were still like early man!
So much to be thankful for, but is man? To be sure, man commits so much foul on the field of life. Man destroys, man kills, man steals. In the circumstance, from all that we know: can it be said, overall, that man is worse than man is good?
Accepting without conceding that man is 55% evil, that cannot and should not be enough justification for man to not be grateful for and to man; taking into cognizance the great goodness man also evinces. Furthermore, seeing that man does not offer God commensurate gratitude for all the goodness we enjoy, it can be deduced that man is just a thankless being. Man’s failure to be grateful horizontally and, especially, vertically, speaks to the horrendousness of the situation. The purpose of this entry, therefore, is to think up explanations for this indecency.
First up: man is ungrateful because he’s -DNAishly- a self-centered and entitled bigot. We always think that we should have got more, we should have been better treated (read pampered). We never for once consider what they gave us could be their all. We never are humble enough to call others’ sacrifice by that name.
Second up: man is ungrateful because he’s a spoilt brat. God gives man so much but since God never goes about, bragging; man takes that for granted. Imagine being created and sent to a ready-made world without being told in clear terms why plus including how you got here. Since life abhors vacuum, you have to feed your empty bigheadedness by thinking that you evolved from an ape.
See how blind and silly and humiliating ingratitude can reduce someone so wonderfully and beautifully made in the image of a majestic God? Even if it was a lie, a grateful person would choose to believe that they came from God rather than from some Hominids or Homo erectus. Or, do we strike a balance by agreeing that those of them who evolved from apes have ingratitude gene while those of us of God are endowed with gratitude gene? Now, where do you belong: to God or to ape?
Third up: keeping an eye on the foregoing, please be guided that too many helpers are the ironic reason a majority of helpees remain ungrateful. It is easy to become an ingrate when you find that what you got was a Greek gift, or when your helper broadcasts, publishes or overhypes the gift. For instance, somewhere in the deep south of Nigeria, in 2016, a politician who had seesawed dishonestly the previous year -to gain electoral advantage- thought to make amends by buying his opponent-friend a befitting birthday gift. Two years later, when interests clashed again, he published the gift as some empowerment he had done; a cheeky, childish subtle blackmail that unfortunately seemed to have worked for him.
In that case the gratitude of 2016 simply transmogrified into -well, you can’t even call that ingratitude, can you? For crying out loud, what was there again to be grateful for? Some so-called givers make gratitude impossible. You send me dry rice at Christmas, just once a year o, and noise it globally via Facebook and sundry media platforms but you still expect me to bow and tremble in gratitude?
Who does that and how can that be, when you had already received more than enough public adoration and adulation through hundreds of thousands of likes, comments and emojis? The bible teaches that one good deed should not receive double gratitude when the doer has displayed pride. It takes something really special for the helpee who has been ridiculed or humiliated to remain in the honourable place of gratitude. This is the answer if you ever wonder why Nigerians seem unthankful to political office holders.
Government money is our money, our commonwealth; so, stop acting generous. And, even more, stop carrying on as if you are doing us a favour. Instead, shut up, and be grateful to us because we first did you the favour of allowing you, in spite of you, to be in charge of our fate. Ingrates should not expect gratitude because doing so is feeding or encouraging ingratitude.
That’s point four. Just as gratitude should beget gratitude, ingratitude begets ingratitude. If you are an ungrateful person, forgerrrit, ingratitude shall follow you like an invisible entourage everywhere you turn. This is neither a prayer nor a wish; it is just as it is.
Fifth up: ingratitude can be a function of familiarity. Someone who thinks they know you -woe betide you if they know how you make your money- would naturally be stingy with gratitude to you no matter how how much you rise and fall for them. They would find you underserving of and unclean enough for their gratitude. They would even think they are helping you discharge some of your ill-gotten wealth.
Sixth up: just as money cannot buy love, goodness can sometimes not attract gratitude. Someone who doesn’t like you can hardly be permanently grateful to you. Once you are no longer able to dispense favours to them, their tap of gratitude dries up on the spot. To say it the way it is: hate or indifference chokes gratitude.
Seventh up: history can hurt, reduce or hamper or even terminate gratitude. Someone you had an ugly encounter with, no matter how much help they render today, suspicion can impede or influence the size of your gratitude. For example, no matter how much help a rapist or murderer or armed robber offers decades later, the victim may never shake off the memory of their historical monstrosity to truly be grateful. Sometimes, when we accuse people of being ungrateful to their helpers, we may first check their history together.
Eighth up: ingratitude can be as a result of ignorance or wrong information or lack of knowledge or awareness. Some helpees have moved against helpers all because the latter had insisted on modesty in which case another person may have claimed the gratitude. In the deep south, there’s a governor who would rather his charity was never announced or credited to him. Any harm if his aides or such other close people claimed credit and with that the concomitant gratitude?
Ninth up: gratitude can be withheld in vengeance. Like a former employee or spouse who feels they were maltreated or shortchanged by their erstwhile boss or partner who’s now at their mercy.
There’s the tendency when tables turn to want to teach an ex-benefactor, who played God, a lesson. Not good, but that’s yet another proof ingratitude might supplant gratitude.
Tenth up: delay can also diminish gratitude. Many people are not ungrateful, they are only waiting for the right time, they are only waiting for everything to be equal to appropriately say thank you. Most of such people almost always end up being deemed ingrates because of intervening events. Lesson: never delay gratitude.
Eleventh up: anger, arrogance, envy, bitterness and such other unholy mannerisms can forestall gratitude. In which case, the beneficiary believes rather erroneously that they are too big to register gratitude or that their benefactor is too small and so does not merit gratitude. In fact, in some cases, it is almost as if denying them gratitude would keep them from being any bigger.
This particular ingrate is both dangerous and incurable.
Twelfth up: injustice, favouritism, nepotism, cronyism and such other forms of corruption can force someone who doesn’t know enough to start being ungrateful. A parent or leader who shows open or disguised preference would notice that the unfavoured are hardly grateful. This catch-22 reason defies advice. For as long as life remaineth, favouritism shall never cease -ingratitude too.
However, here’s the thing. Ingratitude makes you less, makes you get less. Ingratitude makes you feel inferior, needy, helpless, sad, hopeless. Flee from it; eschew it; even if you can’t.
On the winning side of things: gratitude makes you more, makes you bigger, gives you more. Gratitude finds reasons to be so because, indeed, there always are reasons to be grateful. Instead of waiting and in the process risk being called an ingrate, find or crate reasons to be grateful. Learn to be grateful -even for nothing!
God bless Nigeria!
