A full plate

I am middle-class. Nearer the bottom of the middle middle, but middle all the same. I don't hate members of my class; solidarity is big with some of us. One of the things a middle class should do is participate fully in civic affairs, like political organisation and electioneering. I won't be doing is political organising or electioneering. I find it to be the most distasteful thing in the world. It ranks up there with shitting your pants.

People, especially middle class people, tend to be reasonable and amicable until they get into their heads that they should exercise their democratic rights. That's how it almost always begins, with a desire to exercise a democratic right and then it goes downhill from there on out. Reasonable people become rigid and unbending, making patently unreasonable demands, especially on fellow middle class people who just want to sell the government overpriced condom dispensers and buy Range Rovers from RMA. I don't want to inhale and swallow large dollops of teargas.

The real middle class that goes into political organising tends to have a few nuts loose, like a Studebaker. You can see them when they become party bigwigs, in their really shiny suits, even shinier pointy-toed Congolese-style dress-shoes made of snakeskin and their gold-encased latest iPhones into which they are always screaming in their native mother-tongue dialects at a lowly minion they underpay and misuse in service to some political baba. They tend to be insufferable. Now they have brought their insufferable ways to social media.

You see them tweeting and facebooking and instagramming as if they were socialites of the Kenyan variety selling not social cachet but something less salubrious. Come to think of it, these oily and unctuous middle class political operatives usually end up becoming "sponsors" of Kenya's socialites of note, using party funds, where they can lay their paws on them, to fly their paramours to exotic locales like Paris, Dubai, Phuket or Shanghai for assignations of a carnal nature leaving behind bereft spouses and zoned-out scions high on weed or something.

I don't think I am middle class enough to get involved with the political operatives who believe they are my betters. I still think that decent human beings should be honest with those they engage with about common affairs. If you are operating in the world of political operatives with the eye to influencing public policy, please tell your spouse whether or not that lobbyist who paid for your UK-bound business-class ticket did so on the strength of your convictions or the ardent nature of your horizontal mambo. That way both of you can decide how much gray you will both shade on your common moral code.

I am not angry enough, either. Sure, these people make my life hard, but it is not all unpleasant. I can still eat what I want, tooth cavities notwithstanding. I can still go where I want, although Mombasa tourist hotels are not my cup of tea because of their built-in, anti-Black hostility. I can, with a bit of adjusting here and there, live where I want. And if I got fired today, I could survive very comfortably till Thursday next week. So I can't see myself joining the likes of Team Courage or hashtag armies like #GoBeyondTwitter. That just seems like too much work and I already have a job, a side-hustle and a lifless shamba. My plate, Mr Middle Class Organiser, is full.