Majority of people no longer keep to their words. The result of their promise is lies. Even when the person they have lied to brings it to their notice, they do not care. You call their phone lines and write emails to them, they neither pick nor reply. The sad side is that these people with ‘deformed behaviours’ are persons we so hold in high esteem, not that they are faraway fraudsters or gangsters. I’ve always told people that in human relationships, “distance is not measured in miles, but in affection.”

I’m not sure they even know the cost of their aberrations. I feel like the ground should open, when I placed calls on people I have something to do with and, they did not pick or replied the ‘missed calls’. Or, even when I wrote emails, they did not reply, because they were dodging. I feel that I have lost myself a lot in the process of loving and being honest to others, whom I would later found out have ruinous tottering-manners.

Then-again, I have often found consolation in the words of a Woody Allen, which say, to love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

Some would pick the calls and quickly tell you how busy they were and that they were going to call you back shortly, when their intention was to ‘discharge’ you. You would wait for their calls that would never come, till eternity. And somebody who finds it very had to fulfill his or her promise of ‘I’m going to call you back’, how would the person, have the time to reply your emails?

My worry is that people do not know the commitment of their words. Even when they knew, their belief is that they can easily pray or ask for forgiveness from their ‘God’ at will. While they have this mindset, they do not care about what pains their actions have caused the person they have wronged.

My belief-system is that without honouring your fellow human being with your word and action, it would be very had to honour any sky God or underground God. You can’t say “I honour God in everything I do” whereas your fellow human being is dealing with the pains of your betrayal of him or her. Not one, two, three, or four times!

I’m easily convinced by people’s words, but I’ve found out that many people, we think we respect in the society, are just liars and cheats. They do not regard your integrity. Rather, they see a man with integrity as a fool, because he does not cheat with words and always believes in his fellow man. I can remember as a kid that all people needed to keep to business were a handshake and word.

These were seen as sacred. Some of us grew up like that, but into a society that is windswept of quality character and principle. Many people today do not or, have refused to recognise that a man’s word is his bond that should not be played with. Rather, they see how fast and often they sermonise their religious principles as the bond, without which they feel that they are incomplete, whereas they are gnarled of humane manners.

Wonder why the society is falling apart every day? People are ever ready to risk their relationship with promises they can’t and won’t keep. In marriage, I laugh when I see people make promises on the altar they cannot keep, at last. I have suffered in the hands of people who made promises to me in business transactions, but later they unashamedly dishonoured their personal word and, without bathing their eyelids.

And they do not make any attempt to salvage, in order to show that conscience is not only a word in the dictionary, but that which should also be the guiding principle of every living man. It is imperative that we keep to our words. To me, I see this as the essence that we live as human beings, not as beasts. I have had cause not to relate with people deeply, but on the thought that one man does not make an island, what could I do. People should understand that words are the tenets that should prove how honest a man is, not how often he goes into the streets to win persons to his religion.

There is no ‘reality’ without people keeping to their words in this world. I have suffered dishonesty in the hands of many people. And when I sit down and ruminate, I wonder what influence these people were creating in the society. I wonder if people know that the best of impacts in influencing the world is to keep to words. I tell people not to always want the honest man in their lives, but have to also be honest themselves to help encourage the world with healthy ways of co-habiting.

It is sad that many people want an honest man around them, upon that they do not have what the honest man needs. They incessantly betray the honest man with lies and cheating and also call him a fool in their closets. Nonetheless, a Alan Greenspan said that regulation – which is based on force and fear – undermines the moral base of business dealings. (People think) it becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction…

Conversely, for healing, I’m taking succour in the words of a Belinda Taylor, which say, don’t mire up in self despair of your losses, learn from them and move on to other good things in life. Don’t stop allowing the sunshine in, because of the fear that winter will come and engulf the warmth. Hold it close to you to help you through those cold winter days.

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Odimegwu Onwumere is a Poet/Writer and a social commentator. He writes from Rivers State.