Making Love To The Sinners Only
Often without knowing
Never show thy enemies love.
These are the words from Lil Kim’s banger song, Lighters Up.
It’s no different from what Sun Tzu says about enemies. Never give them a chance. Kill them dead and kill them alive, as my high school deputy principal used to say.
From the streets of Brooklyn, the message is relatable. But from one continent to another, there’s a different message. Mr. Nice also sang:
Kikulacho kumbe kinguoni mwako
Rafiki yako ndiye adui wako
Translated, your enemy lies within. You might think that those who plot the worst for you lie outside your circle, but with keen scrutiny, you find many jealous friends plotting your downfall.
Envy is the worst cardinal sin.
Talking of enemies, there’s one that sneaks up on you without knowledge, literally inside you. But since you don’t know about it as it happens, you continue to tolerate it. Almost unconditionally.
The best kind of love is usually unconditional. I love Arsenal F.C. because I will continue to support it whether we win or lose.
We are told how God loves his people, despite their sinning tendencies. He shows love to the sinners, much as humans show love to this sinner.
The first person you show love to
You are the first person you show love to.
Not even your mother. Evidence? Everyone has ever kicked their mother, in utero. It is the only time you can kick your mother and they get pleased with you. It shows that you are literally alive and kicking.
Once you’re born, you yell to your delight and its lack thereof. But once your problems are attended to, you calm down. Soon enough you learn how to exploit those around you. They do your bidding, until they can’t.
Now you have to find alternative ways of getting what you want. You start to crawl. Everything you find you want to put inside your mouth. Sometimes, it's gritty and tasty. Sometimes it gives you a tummy ache. Most times, it’s adventurous.
You do it for the adventure.
As you grow older, you want to fit in. You desist from going against your small group dynamic. At times, you prefer your company. At times you crave attention or somebody to listen to you.
It could turn suicidal, but you don’t give in so easily. You still love yourself enough to give yourself a chance.
Throughout life, we love ourselves. But sometimes, when you have a child, you forget yourself and start prioritizing the child over yourself. It’s a beautiful thing. It can be tiring.
Like the child that manipulates its parents to get what it wants, inside humans grows another entity you shouldn’t tolerate. It can be provided for. It can be nurtured. We can call it a sinner because eventually, it can continue its harsh treatment despite all the love it gets.
The host shows it love, but it continues to sin. Making love to sinners is the story of the emperor of maladies.
Enter the one who you shouldn’t be showing love to
You make love to the sinners only — Clark Keeng
I’m talking about cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee gives a biography of cancer that was moving enough to earn it a Pulitzer Prize. Cancer is the sinner we make love to.
It starts as a little cell that breaks away from the norm. We’re supposed to multiply only so much, but cancer won’t hear any of it. It will continue to replicate as it so wishes.
With time, it forms an army of clones. These clones bear the same properties. But there’s a subtle difference between it and how children can be manipulative.
The moment you catch your employee stealing money from the counter, you know they have been doing it for some time. The only difference is that this time round, you caught them.
Forgiving them creates room for them to create a better way of not getting caught. Cancer behaves similarly. It makes the most of the fact that you cannot detect it in the first place.
The problem with cancer is delayed feedback. Delayed feedback has drawbacks evident in our everyday life. Let’s take the example of traffic jams.
One person can try to overtake and end up finding a roadblock ahead, forcing it to streamline their car back with the slowpoke lane. If a good number of people do that, eventually, they create a point of construction ahead.
The slowpoke, knowing how important it is to stick to the same lane, at the designated speed, sticks to it. But as the cars increase in number and density, we end up having heavy traffic. Not because there’s an accident, but because every car delays just enough to delay the one behind it a little longer.
Traffic jams form because of delayed feedback. You don’t know how your actions will influence the future flow of traffic when you swerve to move faster than the slowpoke in front of you.
You too don’t see the impact of sticking to the slowpoke lane until the traffic thickens. In which case, once it has formed, who’s to blame? All parties had a role in it. The feedback was delayed, slow, and intangible.
Cancer has a similar picture. By the time most cases are detected in a regular checkup, it has grown to a monstrous size. In the meantime, all we were doing was:
Making love to the sinners only.
An unstable relationship
It’s important to note that not all cancers are the same.
If I take a petri dish and create the right environment for the growth of a particular strain of bacteria, we can say that there is evidence of life. Evidence of life tells little about its diversity.
Same case for cancer. Evidence of a mass does not mean it is cancer. Some masses are only pus collections or cysts.
Cancers can either be benign or malignant. They can respond either well or poorly to medication. They can have mass effects or hormonal ones.
It is important to have this in mind. The veil of the term can send the wrong message to the layperson.
What is evident, however, is how bodies consistently nourish cancers. Cancers too find ways of making the most of the very little they get.
Picture a basketball team that does only one training a week and improves their ability to win championships 10 times more than a team that practices daily but only enhances its chances by twice as much.
Cancer cells have a way of producing more energy for replication from little supply compared to the other cells of the body. It’s like the non-compliant student who cheats and gets more from a quiz relative to the hardworking student who passes, but not as much as the cheater.
It constitutes an unstable relationship. Hierarchical relationships can be stable or unstable. According to the theory of Organismal Selection, organisms seek stable mergers. These are the stable relationships.
Typically, the role of one entity serves the other and vice versa. But when one only serves itself, it becomes unstable. It soon becomes unsustainable.
Cancer patients then become weaker, worsened by medication which attacks the other normal cells, worsening the state now for both the compliant and the non-compliant cells.
Making love to the sinners only can have its consequences.
What I’m trying to say is…
How I see cancer is as an organism.
Organisms love themselves. Cancer cells too love themselves, so much that they forget where they get their unconditional love from. The body thus, ends up showing love to a cheater. A sinner. To its downfall.
Ain’t no Superman
No cape is on me
Coz you make love
To the sinners only
Love, however, finds a way.
Several measures have been taken to cure cervical cancer, whose mechanisms we are well versed with. Awareness campaigns have improved the rates of early detection. Improvements in technology have also increased the different ways we foresee tackling this sinner.
Hopefully, in the future, we won’t show it so much love.
Then again, it could be that it has something to teach us too.
Even though love finds a way, there is no escaping its mystery.
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