It’s scary when parents act like high school bullies

I would like to preface what i have to say by telling you that i am not a parent. I chose this path because my lifestyle demands complete freedom to wake up and sleep whenever i damn well please, plus i am not enamoured with the idea of spending my disposable income on school fees. I always thought of my hedonistic choices as being selfish, but when it comes down to it, i have nothing on parents.

A few weeks ago a group of parents in Goa pressured the authorities at their children’s school to expel a group of 13 kids. Now i was pretty sure that the kids who were up for expulsion were a bunch of rotten apples. You know — selfish, hedonistic, that type of thing. Based on the sheer numbers i also assumed that they were operating in a gang, all 13 of them out to ruin the other good kids. But i was wrong and it turns out that these unlucky 13 are in fact children who have been diagnosed with AIDS. That’s not all; besides suffering a life-threatening disease, these children are orphans.

I have no idea how such confidential health information became so public, but word got out and the parents, in a panic over the thought that by merely sharing a classroom their children were being put at risk, decided to band together, oh look gang mentality, and run these kids out of town.

I am usually a sore loser but even i have to admit that when it comes to OTT self-centred behaviour you guys are beating me at my own game. And look, i actually find pretty much all kids annoying (there are only so many times i can listen to them sing ‘Frozen’ badly) but this business has managed to upset old stony-hearted me. These people are so clearly bereft of compassion for what appears to be the most vulnerable segment of our society that i wonder how well qualified they are to be parents in the first place.

I think that prospective parents should be subject to a written exam followed with an interview to assess their abilities to raise a responsible next generation and anyone so lacking in empathy should have their reproductive rights revoked. And speaking of written tests i think it’s safe to assume that these parents were never schooled. If they had been they would have figured out how to read and they would have read that AIDS can only be spread in very specific ways. So unless these kids are giving each other blood transfusions while playing doctor-doctor, or having unprotected sex while playing house-house they are not at risk.

And of course like all good parents who use their kids as an excuse to get out of social obligations they couldn’t give a damn about, these guys are also using their kids to propagate their ignorant views by claiming that their children have been frightened by all this. I have to ask, who do you think is more frightened — the orphaned kids with AIDS or the ones who live happily and well at home with their mothers and fathers? The fact is that kids are going to be frightened, they are KIDS!

You are not, you are supposedly adults, you took the very adult decision to have children. But you have not acted like adults, you have instead behaved like high school bullies who only pick on the weakest, most defenceless ones because you know that’s the best you can do and by doing this you are passing on a valuable lesson to your own children — that it’s OK to victimise those who can’t fight back. You know who else does a good job of persecuting helpless kids? Paedophiles.

I really do hope the meek inherit the earth because you know what? The rest of us just don’t deserve it.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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