By Bimbola Segun-Amao (@BimbolaBabs)
Life isn’t easy, and we have all come to embrace that. But life is a bit harsher on the left-handed. Asides scissors, spiral notebooks and desks designed in consideration of the right-handed people alone, the society is unnecessarily unfair to the left-handed. Here, where I live, the society sees you as uncultured or rude, if you offer or receive stuff with your right hand.
I was recently affronted on this. A lecturer handed me a script and without thinking, I impulsively held out my left hand and he refused to hand it over, he wanted the right hand. Why are people this impractical? What if my right hand was amputated or paralysed? Would he shove it into my mouth since he found my left hand so disgusting?
I had a classmate in secondary school; she had no use of her right hand. It was weak and flaccid. On several occasions, she would have been ‘corrected’ and criticized before discovering she has been left with no choice, and do you know what? Most people sheepishly apologized when they found out they had no option but to accept her left-handedness; she had only one functional arm.
I am not left-handed, more of mixed-handed; there are some tasks easier for me to do with the left hand, doing laundry especially. Some are truly ambidextrous, they are able to do any task equally well with either hand.
The most common theory for being left handed is that of brain lateralization and division of labour. The brain is cross wired so that the left hemisphere controls the right handed side of the body and vice-versa and hand dominance is connected with brain dominance on the opposite side. Being left-handed is determined by brain functionality- so let it be, no one has a therapy for that yet.
Forcing the right hand usage on someone who is naturally wired as left-handed should be seen as harassment. Harassment covers a wide range of behaviours of an offensive nature. It’s any behaviour intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive. Isn’t that what they do when they shout ‘No, right hand please’? And when your right hand is buried in dirt, holding on to something or visibly unavailable, you are expected to express regret for that; it’s simply unnecessary, I find it asinine, no one should apologize for being a left hander.
There’s nothing wrong with having predominant use of one arm, either right or left. If not, the Creator would have made us all one armed or 2 right arms and we would have ended up being exceptionally ugly creatures.
I wish I could write fast and neat like I do with my right hand, I can bet if I write you a check of millions with my left hand and offer same with the left hand, it wouldn’t be so disgusting, would it?
By the way, Barack Obama is a left hander, and I’m sure if he offers some of these people an ordinary pen with his “disgusting left hand”, they would have wished the press and paparazzi never missed that picture. That picture would find its way into being a social media header picture.