The workload on my table made Dr. Reuben Abati’s treatise on the issue of Valentine Day celebration to first hit the news stand before mine. In other words, I had started composing a similar opinion three days ago though with slight difference, the difference being that the Valentine conception has come to be one of those colonial mentalities that is still dominating our lives.
Valentine is being celebrated as an old time established cult-like system; a kind of an annual festival that must be observed with gusto.
Like Dr. Abati said, couples; legal and illegal ones, fall over each other to display love, affection, romance and all such mind burgling relationships or interactions as if after the Day, such interactions would disappear, only to resurface the following year, on the same day.
Illegal couples, like so-called boyfriend and girlfriend, particularly amongst students, take the opportunity of this day to freely indulge in romance, affection and above all, sexual relations, to the extent that many of such interactions result in unwanted pregnancies, abortions, unpleasant consequences and even death.
For this year in Abuja, for example, some health related None Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organization (CSO) have distributed hundreds of condoms to people, especially the youths, ahead of today’s observance of the Valentine Day. As a matter of fact, whatever good intention the distribution of condoms might connote, the issue that comes to mind by the mere mention of condom is that people were being prepared for sex festival and sex orgies without limit.
When you distribute condoms to the people, particularly to youths who are not married, what are you implying?
Are you asking the beneficiaries of the condom gift to go and drop them in the soak-away or keep them in their boxes or display the condoms as articles of beauty in their rooms?
Knowing how adventurous the youths of nowadays are, they are bound to go into serious business of sex, sex and more sex with all its negative consequences.
I mean, just imagine you coming back home and finding a condom in the pocket of your 20 year old son: what would be your immediate reaction or thought?
And for the Valentine, it really makes no sense that a day is elected in the whole of a year for couples across the world to simultaneously show love and affection to each other. What happens to the remaining 364 or 365 days in a particular year?
And what is Valentine?
Valentine’s Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, originated as a Western Christian liturgical feast day to honour one or more early saints, named Valentinus, and is recognized as a significant cultural and commercial celebration in many regions around the world.
According to Wikipedia, a popular hagiographical account indicates how Saint Valentine was imprisoned for performing weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry and for ministering to Christians, who were persecuted under the Roman Empire.
According to legend, during his imprisonment, Saint Valentine healed the daughter of his jailer, Asterius, and before his execution, he wrote her a letter titled: “Your Valentine” as a farewell.
The day first became associated with romantic love within the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. In 18th-century England, it evolved into an occasion in which lovers expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards, known as “valentines.”
In Europe, Saint Valentine’s Keys are given to lovers “as a romantic symbol and an invitation to unlock the giver’s heart” as well as to children, in order to ward off epilepsy, called Saint Valentine’s Malady.
Saint Valentine’s Day is an official feast day in the Anglican Communion as well as in the Lutheran Church. Many parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church also celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day, albeit on July 6 and July 30, the former date in honour of the Roman presbyter Saint Valentine, and the latter date in honour of Hieromartyr Valentine, the Bishop of Interamna (modern Terni).
Is it weighty enough for the people in the world to resort to all the later day orgies on February 14, simply on account of the fact that Saint Valentine was killed by Roman Empire because of his display of love and or that Saint Valentine finally wrote a love letter to the daughter of the Emperor before his execution?
There are thousands of similar cases or deeper cases of love mishaps locally that are worth celebrating, if we are to place our love and affection on the basis of how another couple endures the love or promotes it, like Saint Valentine.
Two cases would suffice.
There was this man in Zaria, Kaduna state, who had a near fatal accident four days after he married to a beautiful lady. For four months that he was bed-ridden in the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, the wife, who had never had any good time with him after the wedding, took care of him, including disposing his excrete, urine and even feeding him manually. Eventually, the man died.
Secondly, yours sincerely had wanted to marry a young lady when she was just 18 years. For one reason or the other, there was separation. Yet, ten years later, certain circumstance still brought us together when she was 28 years. Again, after some months, another circumstance made the separation possible. And yet again, when she was 45, we met and finally got married.
That is to say that we finally married after 30 years of staccato relationship. Isn’t this enough to be instituted as an annual celebration, for all the lovers across the world?
I agree of course, the idea of couples celebrating wedding anniversary, which of course is an individualistic thing. This is more sensible than the lumping up of certain celebration that is more of celebration of fornication, illegality and promiscuity universally in general, and domestically within Nigeria in particular, especially hiding under it to commit all sort of sexual escapades.
Celebrating the display of love by single man in history, even with his name as the symbol of such celebration makes it look like, at best, cultism and at worst, ignoramus all of which translate into madness or childishness.
It is, perhaps, for this reason or other nauseating reasons that Iran has just banned the celebration of the Valentine Day.
And for the rest of the world, there is need to have a rethink with a view to redefining love and affection which according to Dr. Abati, should not be all about physical interactions, such as sex, touch, kiss and or talk.
I therefore recommend the antidote Abati offered, and for all times throughout the year, and not on the so-called Valentine Day. [myad]
