A Middle Eastern bomb rocked America

The last few days in the news was mostly about Ahmed Mohammed, the 14-year-old who tried to impress his teacher with his homemade clock, but ended up getting cuffed and accused of building a bomb.

I bet he’s glad about his teacher’s poor judgement now.

But this is not about Ahmed the Sudanese bomber. This is about another bomber.

We must start this story where the journey to the big bang began.

There once was a Syrian man who had honestly had enough. He grew up in a Syria where, just like the rest of the Middle East, political upheaval was as common as birds chirping or people breathing.

When his frustration reached its peak, he decided to let it out. So he did what most of his fellow students who felt the same way did –activism. That got him a few arrests and some jail time while he was in University.

He was a revolutionary who dreamed of rewriting the future of the Middle East. He knew he needed more, he needed to be better equipped, so he went to a land where he believed people were best equipped –America.

He enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to bag a Ph.D. in Political Science, and even more importantly, make his radicalism cement stronger. As a reward for his efforts, he found love on campus, and that love affair produced a baby.

Unfortunately for this Radical, he wasn’t there to be the father for his baby for reasons which I don’t believe are important for this post. What is important is that he passed his radical genes to his son, the bomber, as we’ll come to see.

This new Radical grew up with adopted parents, where they equipped his mind too for the task ahead.

Fast forward to the build-up to the bomb.

The thing is, this Radical had great ideas, but he couldn’t really build a bomb by himself, so he teamed up his friend, and they began plotting and building from the garage of the house he lived.And they succeeded.

And the bomb went off.

America, and in fact, the world never remained the same after. Today, over half of American homes live with the consequences of that big bang.

All this, because a random Syrian man refused to sit his ass in his country. That man was Abdul-Fattah Jandali.

The son he passed his radical genes to, Steve Jobs, became the co-founder of Apple and his mind-blowing, world-changing vision is one of the reasons you can read this piece on your device.

Coming back home.

In Nigeria, the profiling is the same, except it’s in even more silly things.

They are in what we like to call ‘minor’ and ‘its-not-that-serious’ issues.

Things like ‘the Igbo boy is a fraudster’, ‘the Hausa boy is a beggar or butcher’.

Let’s not even get started on Yoruba boys.

The thing is, profiling breeds paranoia, and paranoia breeds fear. And one cool guy I found on Google when I was looking for quotes to use for this piece said,

The point is, profiling sucks most of the time. Profiling is lazy, since understanding people as individuals is so much work. Profiling is the seed that sprouts to become racism and other scisms.

The moral of the story is: Stop. Profiling.

Well, unless you are trying to decide what a person would love to or love not to eat.