Necessary evil

Without being told, we all know that the best way to keep ourselves far away from trouble is by not socializing with people who we know are trouble themselves, in my case, the bad guys in my environment. We always advise people to be careful about the kind of people they make their friends because like the saying goes, show me your friend and I will tell you who you are.

Well, lately I've been thinking about it for a while and maybe, just maybe, it's not entirely a bad idea to have some bad friends here and there, we just have to regulate the way we hangout with them and make sure they have little to no influence on us because the only reason we want them as friends is for our own benefits and protection and nothing else and I will tell you why.

_{Photo by Keller Chewning}

In a country where the police force is almost useless hence the reason why we (most especially the youths) hardly report cases to the authorities, there are certain situations and altercations that we have to handle ourselves, and seeing how this is a student environment where anyone could be a dangerous cultists, it's always a good idea to be a well known person among the bad guys in the street before attempting to fight anyone for any wrongdoing done to you or else you might end up getting attacked by this guys and sometimes even killed.

Something had happened today at my hostel that got a lot of us angry but we ended doing nothing because the people involved were people who are known to associate with all sorts of dangerous people and we knew that anything we do to him would be done to us later in the future.

This guy had walked up to someone at my hostel and asked him to sit on the floor, when the guy refused, he has placed his finger into his eyes before confidently walking away. His reason for asking the guy to sit on the floor was because he heard a rumor that people from my hostel were always gossiping about him. A stupid and dumb reason for him to react that way, but he had done that because he knew that we couldn't retaliate due to the kind of people he associates with.

That was the moment we all started to wish we had been friends with those same people, the bad guys. Because being friends with them would have leveled the play field because they wouldn't want to get involved by attacking us because we're friends, instead they would try to make peace between both parties, an idea which we would welcome because we probably would have given the guy the beating of his life before then.

Unfortunately, this same reason is why a lot of people end up getting involved in cults, not because they like cultism but because they wanted the protection that came with it and the only way they could get it was by becoming a member of their fraternity.