At the end of it all, it comes down to this: Goliaths are not giants! The people who cut our umbilical ties with nature; those bullies who trampled on everything we do; waylayers who robbed and who sexually assaulted us with knives, guns and bombs are no giants.

Like the Biblical story, the modern-day’s Goliath-David battle is remarkable. In the Bible, Goliath was in armour head to toe but the uncovered strait on his forehead admitted David’s pebble. The relationship between the two subjects was not right and the environment was even unsuitable. Goliath had been hurt by the audacity, more of effrontery, of King Saul to send David out to him, and was roaring. Also, there was his physical preponderance over David.

Though David was a shepherd and technically a skilled slingshot user, the odds were that none of his five pebbles would have been lethal on Goliath. He may have killed a wolf and lion, Goliath’s monstrosity transcended David’s bravery. His (David) was more tasking on strength and poise. Ordinarily, David would be trembling in fear, his slingshot skillfulness consumed, waiting to become feast for vultures that had come to nest on the battlefield’s trees. Any shot at Goliath’s head would have ricocheted away from the head armour after zero impact.

Going by the Vatican’s requirement for late Pope John Paul II’s sainthood, two extraordinary healing that gets scientifically confirmed and which do not have recipients relapsing after a brief period of time, the measurement of science can be applied to Christendom and recorded events. But yet, the ambit of science is yet to accommodate explanations of extraordinary occurrences like medically impossible healing. Pope John Paul II’s healing of French Nun Marie Simon-Pierre of Parkinson disease is an epitome. To have aimed and shot Goliath with precision, David must have been divinely steeled.

Vanquishing of goliathic powers by comparatively dwarfish ones have occurred severally in human history and may eternally be with us. Citing no distant times, apartheid was defeated in South Africa about twenty years ago. This year, repressed youths of Egypt and Tunisia sacked their decades-old autocratic regimes. Of the two revolutions, I wrote a poem, centering a bit on Egypt, The African Emperor. The first two lines of the poem, quoted below, were written in praise of the valour that bayoneted the resistances the regimes put up:         

                                               His friend’s palace was

                                               hurled down by bare peasants.

It is thus a world inevitable that ordinary people will collectively rise to yank off yokes of Goliaths. It may take time and may seem eons, but the system of fear in which the Goliath thrived, will eventually collapse. But the world has to stop revolving in the circle in which a Goliath is inadvertently or deliberately made, defeated, only for another to be made elsewhere. There must be institutionalization of eternal vigilance and caution. Grounds gained from Goliaths must no longer be lost to them again. Liberated Tunisia and Egypt must avoid going the way of Iran which sacked the Shah in 1979 only for election protesters to suffer a bloody crackdown, thirty-one years later, in 2009.

A liberated area has it as responsibility to inspire the liberation of others. The culture of lawlessness that has engulfed Egypt post-revolution has to done away with. During the autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak, there were hardly sectarian violence, robbing in the streets, night phobia among gory others. The Police used torture to keep order. But now, after the freedom beacon had glinted, and the revolution’s crown, democratization, near, Egypt is in disorder. It is time Egyptian reined in surging compulsions to defy authority because it is the chaotic society that germinate a Goliath.

Now, the divine fodder for the liberation of self from goliaths, no matter their constitution, is to resolutely pore at their beings and see that there is no giant atom in their nuclei. When we recognize this, wresting confiscated dignities from them will be easier and quicker. The main (mean) characteristics that the Goliaths project making us think they possess are false.

It was a worthy discovery in the selected videos released by the United States government, that Osama Bin Laden, the man who at the snap of his fingers many were liable to die, used to employ cheap black dye on his white beard before filming terror videos. He could only pour fear into the world and suborn misguided persons to kill innocents in a false grim image.

In catch and hide games, the person that is being chased always seem to control the game. When he conveniently sought refuge in obscurity, his chasers were left racking their brains about his whereabouts; but he is not totally free of the sensations he created. There was the part conformation and deviation to the Isaac Newton’s law of motion; for every action, there is an equal and similar reaction.

Goliaths do not blissfully stay in their refuges. They spend their days in paralytic fear of being caught. They do not get to see the sun rise or set. They do not feel the wind walk on their faces. They are always buried in the dank refuges, scheming how to escape to another obscure place. Their deeds stay on their breasts, haunting them. The executioner of innocents will always have the nightmarish dreams in Kwesi Brew’s poem, The executioner’s dream.

Yemi Soneye is a graduate of Agricultural Economics and Extension from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria. His works have appeared on Sentinel Nigeria, Saraba magazine, Istanbul Literary Review and Palapala magazine. He was a winner in the 2010 StoryTime One Sentence Short Story Competition.