A Better Generation Start From Being Parents

The world nowadays is continuously getting changed a lot. There is a lot of positive changes happened, but just like “yin and yang” philosophy, it also comes a balance with the negative issues that we have been through. Thankfully, God has placed us in a beautiful loving country, Indonesia, where we could live together in a good harmony and peace. It is a great blessing from God that we should thank for every day, that we have the feeling of comfort and happiness to live in this country, and I believe we had given our best positive contributions for our country as Government Officer. But if we compare to the world now, this feeling of comfort and happiness doesn’t come for granted, because in the other parts of the world there is still happening the dark issues. These dark issues are including the crimes, illegal acts, corruption, violence, et cetera. In this time, let’s take our mind for a second to wander and experience an “intellectual adventures” in the other side of the world, which is the dark side.

Recently, the issue of religious political movements and military in Afghanistan was raised and people became so curious about it. I’m not going to talk about any religion actually, but my purpose is to have a deep thought about this issues that happened in the world. The first issue and fact spreading on YouTube is the video of Hillary Clinton’s speech, where she said for the first time it was America who had the idea to create Mujahidin or the fighters to make Soviet left Afghanistan, so that America supported their weapon to fight, but after the mission had succeed, which was Soviet left Afghanistan, then Hillary said America realized that they had created “the monsters". Hillary considered the people of this group as “monsters” because they were continuously living in combat, and of course, this is from the American’s perspective. But, it was all again about political war between the two super power countries and the history had been proved. Furthermore, this political war certainly takes its toll. Afghanistan considered by The United Nations to be one of the most dangerous places to children. Thousands of children have been killed or injured, even they were being recruited to become soldier in the battlefield. According to Human Rights Watch, the group have been training and deploying children between the ages of 13 and 17 for various military operations.

As our mind follow the curiosity, we also found out the second issue and the fact that Afghanistan is one of the biggest drugs producer country in the world. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, this country produces the largest amount of Opium (poppy plant) for more than 80% of the world's supply, and this group collects taxes from the opium farmers and the laboratories converting opium into heroin. Although there are countries in the world which common for people to consume drugs, but the majority countries ban drugs because the medical research indicates that consuming drugs is damage for health and can caused death. Many countries in the world also approved that drugs were illicit item. Here, our mind is going for the intellectual adventure. I believe the right conduct of human will reject the drugs consumption, even the true and pure teaching of religion prohibits human to consume drugs because it could harm human body. Take this drug matters as the dark side of Afghanistan, and the fact that in another country, including in Indonesia, we could not overlook this dark issue too. Hold on, our mind hasn’t got there yet.

Meanwhile we move to the other parts of the world, where our mind wanders to know more about the drugs business. There comes Mexico as the leader of drugs cartel in the world. According to the Vice Channel video on YouTube, and this is also can be considered as the third fact, that Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world where every day the mothers cried for her missing son and the police didn’t care about it because the police had been already bribed. Therefore, the desperate mothers were searching for their missing son and equipped themselves with shovel to dig up the land and finally they found the death body of their loved son was buried in the land. But, there is no justice for them. Their sons had been kidnapped and murdered offhanded. The murderer is the member of the organized crime mobs who has the higher power to bribe the police, which is none other than the drugs cartel. 

This is the dark issue happened in Mexico and our mind is continuing the intellectual adventure. On the part of the video which showed the interview with the leader man of the cartel, he spoke about his point of view to kill people and make money in drugs business. He threw a statement that I think we need to stress here, his statement is "because with violence comes fear, and with fear comes respect". Now, let’s stop wandering and start a deep thought.

The organized crime mobs consider fear and respect to be synonymous. They try to create respect using fear. So, my thought on his statement, he must be misunderstood the term of “respect” because he sees respect from the negative perspective, which is not true at all. He said that, with fear comes respect, but the truth is fear and respect are two different terms. Respect is positive term, but fear is negative term. Fear is forced, while respect is earned. And he said that, with violence comes fear. It is a fact that violence is related to bullying, intimidating, attacking, oppressing, torturing, harmful, dangerous, damaged, et cetera, which can cause fear. On the paragraphs before, I have discussed about some happening dark issues, and I thought there is the same root of those dark issues, which is about the violence. Violence became the fastest way for some people to possess other people’s respect.  While it is absolutely not true, a lot of people see it that way. And I thought this misleading concept has to be stopped. Quoted from Albert Camus, “nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear”.

In today’s generation, I could say that many child rearing is based on this concept. Those people who did violence in their adulthood mostly because they had this concept when they were children. Parents and teachers whom are being considered to build character of our children should be aware that they are responsible to teach kindness to earn respect instead of using fear to get them obedience.

According to The Journal of Psychology Psikostudia Research (2019), there is a relationship between empathy and respect. The higher empathy possessed by students, the higher they could give respects. Empathy significantly affects the quality of personal and professional life, especially those related to social relationship. Daniel Goleman describes empathy as an important trait of emotional intelligence and it can be learned. Empathy does not mean that one agrees with another, but merely indicates that someone values and supports that person's point of view.

It must be really a thought, that parents should teach empathy to children, and the school institution should against violence, especially in the form of bullying which is very common to happen between students. According to Dixon (2009) respect is the main factor which has the most influence in building relationship between individuals and it is also the basic factor to create a fair society. This is my wishful thinking, my dream, and also could be our dream together to create a fair society where people and children could be treated with fairness and empathy and also could protect each other from harm.

Although we believe that the world has its fate and we cannot change the destiny, but still we can at least try to make a better generation, start from being parents.