The Beginning of Parental Crime
This term came up when I was having dinner with my boyfriend at a nearby eatery around the Cikarang Baru area. The place was located in a middle-class area and there were scruffy-looking little kids who came around every now and then, begging for money and pretty much annoyed the heck out of us.
It didn’t affect us much until it became a lot more frequent, and bothered us from enjoying our dinner. It was quite tiring, really, flagging our hands off every now and then whenever one of them came to our table and started murmuring something in a pleading voice.
The whole thing might sound cruel and inhumane, considering that our conditions were a lot more fortunate than them, and of course they didn’t choose to be born to beg. But I couldn’t help wondering that perhaps they did it because their parents told them to. When I saw them I wondered where their parents were and I was amazed that they’d let their children roam the streets at night, begging for money from one venue to another. And then it clicked me that the parents were probably sitting comfortably at home, thinking that their kids were the one working their ass off to feed the family.
I told my boyfriend about it, and he agreed, and then goes, “Roughly said, some parents invest in their children the same way they invest money in a property or a business, and they give no options for the children’s own freewill to choose their own paths. They probably don’t realize it, but it’s a crime itself to think that that’s what having children is about.”
Right away I thought about those rich upper-class families who send their children abroad to study business management, e-commerce and the likes just so that the children could expand the family business and triple the profits for the next seventh generations to come. I’ve known some of these children who were in dilemmas – they have their own dreams to pursue, dreams that collide with their parents’ wishes.
It struck me hard to think that these rich parents were no different than those who let their children became beggars in the evenings. The purpose was none other but the same – so that the children are the ones making the money, not them.
“I wonder what the hell were these people thinking when they were having children. Did they just did it and hope for the best or were they not thinking at all?” I said to my boyfriend.
His reply, “I don’t think they have a single clue let alone realise the responsibility of having children. Most people do it because they think it’s the next step to do after they get married. I’ve talked to those who had children, and they said that life was not the same if you never experienced being a parent, and yet they complained about taking care of their own children. It’s funny how they say one thing that contradicts the other. They go around telling people to go have children because it’s great and yet they don’t want to take care of their own – I mean, look at these kids. I’m sure they’re let to beg the streets because their parents didn’t want to take care of them.”
Just the other day, as I was helping out my boyfriend moving out from his old boarding house, I saw a cat giving birth, right in front of the fence, and all the kittens were dead when they came out.
I thought how odd it was that cats breed all the time, uncontrollably, and yet they contribute nothing to the environment. They just exist and multiply but fail to have any sort of purpose or means. Just like how it is with human. They go forth and multiply, and yet their existence causes nothing but to waste more oxygen. All they know is that they have to have children, fill this already over-crowded earth, hoping that these kids would grow up finding their own ways and washing their hands off from the responsibility of parenting.
Besides, there’s always destiny or the society to blame when things go wrong.
2 comments
I have to disagree with you here.
Parents send out their children to be educated so that the children can gain enough knowledge to support themselves later on in this harsh world -> and I think this applies to all levels of society.
But still does not answer my main question: Do these parents have children because they want to contribute something to the world and make it a better place to live because from what I’ve seen the world is not getting better and most people have children bearing no purpose as to why they want to.