A Good Name

My old man will always gather us (his kids) in the living room every now and then to occasionally give us certain words of wisdom that he feels would help us in life as we all leave home to go become our own men (my parents had four boys), and if I remember correctly, he had once spoken to us about the importance of having a good name.

Back in the day when we lived in the ghetto, there was this wealthy man who had two houses in the area, both houses were both more than two storey buildings and it was filled with occupants. These houses were considered the best in the area and yet the owner of the houses wasn't exactly a happy man.

_{Photo by Giordano Rossoni}

I don't know how the rumor spread but I remember growing up in that area, hearing that that man was a cultist and by cult, I meant people who belong to secret societies where they perform blood money ritual and all sort of scary things. Up till this day, I have no idea where people got that information from but everyone believed it.

And at first I didn't know the impact such bad name has on someone (because I was still a kid back then) until the day I saw this man walking home and tried to stop at least five commercial motorcycles to get him home but none of them stopped. Mind you, this was an elderly man who shouldn't be on his feet for long because of his age, and yet none of this motorcyclist stopped to pick him up.

And it wasn't as if he was asking for a free ride, he was going to pay but no one wanted his money because everyone in the area all had this mindset that his money was blood money and they wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I remember not thinking much about it back then but now it's sad and scary. It's sad because he was an elderly man who clearly needed help to get home and it was scary because it just goes to show the kind of damage a bad name can do to someone.

Unfortunately, most of the youths this days don't care. We're in a generation where people even glorify things like fraud and even money rituals. It's crazy that a lot of people have lost their ways and what's even more scary is that it doesn't look like things will be getting better anytime soon.