Teluk Intan and all that jazz
Azly Rahman
What is promised to our youth in this by-election that is pitching the old versus the young? What do we need to see radically changed in our society? Here are my thoughts, especially today.
I am very sad today, reading about rape cases involving minors – gang-rape, to be exact, of ten, twelve, thirty young kids destroying each other! Madness. No-nonsense parenting is key here, folks.
Just when I had finished writing this first draft for this column, I read about a two year-old girl taken away from a shopping mall and later found with her head severed and her body dumped near the Klang River. Madness.
Days earlier we read about the early morning robbery of two nuns in Seremban, of which one of them died of serious head injuries. Almost daily we still read about snatch thefts resulting in the victims injured. An endless cycle of violence we are living in. Madness.
Back to what is happening to our youth.
Wake-up call
Let us help educate each other. Society is being destroyed right in front of our eyes. This is a wake-up call. Each family has to do its own job of taking care of their children while slowly releasing these wonderful human beings into society to participate as good, intelligent, ethical citizens.
Our society is more concerned with a wasteful RM70 million pandas from China, hudud, Islamic state, high-income society, world-class education, who wins in by-elections, which politician is the most beautiful and good-looking, who is the richest man or woman in the country, which politician assemblyperson is going to jump ship, how many more stadium roofs collapsing, what airplane ping we are still hearing, what derogatory word to use against each other or different race and religion, what kind of shouting match to engage in in Parliament, what X-rated sensational news to report in even the tabloids for the consumption of children since the Anwar Ibrahim Trial of Sodomy I, how many milligrams of haram nano-substance is in the human body, the endless Perkasa-Isma complaint against liberalism and embarking upon a global reach to spread ultra-parochial thinking, and all other categories of nonsense – all these but not how to raise a good generation and ensure parental accountability.
Wake up, all of us. Wake up! We are losing the next generation. The key is to fix education – making schools a happier place so that kids can find meaning, belongingness, eager to learn everyday, their gifts and talents appreciated, channeled well in the most productive ways, and they learn to craft vision… to get them out of the cycle of poverty, so that they will not detour daily to some empty houses, buildings, etc. and not to play truant, ponteng kelas, and rape people, gang rape to be exact, and these children gang-raping, rempitising, and terrorising the neighborhood, are mostly Malay-Muslims too, to be exact!
Perkasa – why don’t you focus your jihad on these kinds of work in helping our youth and parents with poor parenting skill cope with the demands of hypermodern life?
I missed my kampong back in the day when I get to kiss the hands of old folks and give my respect to the elders, as if each one of them is a Don Vito Corleone – because it took a kampong to raise us.
Together, we must create a Learning Society of Pride so that we may always stand tall instead of striving hard to become a Leaning Society of the Tower of Pisang in a banana republic falling down one by one as kampong heroes.
But how do we do this – in a world of madness, of the dumb and dumber?
