Parents Will Save The World

From Gilgamesh, Siddhartha Gautama, Confucious, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar to Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Jong-Un, MBS, Trump, Putin – all thanks to their parents, these individuals were enabled to influence the flow of events in the world.

Parents do change the world. They can raise children who are oblivious to usurpers of power, or support revolutionaries who instill peace and prosperity.

Parents are at the root of every problem the world faces today. Everything else is a consequence of their actions, even this article.

So how can parents raise noble and intelligent children who will improve our humanity’s future?

The work starts today. We, or those who agree with me, must roll up our sleeves and educate parents, not their children, how to educate their children.

Parents, naturally, are in the best position to be the teachers of their children. Frankly, if someone shirks away from being a teacher to their child, that person should not have had children.

Parenting is not just providing shelter, food and care, but also education equal or higher to that of the parents.

Many parents today rely on school teachers to teach their kids – wrong move! Let me explain why: a child’s natural capacity to learn maxes out near the educational level of his parents. So if a parent is unable to solve a 5th-grade math problem, what makes you think his child is going to solve it?

A school teacher is powerless here because this child will lack motivation to learn. The child takes after his parents who apparently are grownups and are doing fine without knowing how to solve 5th-grade math problem. So why listen to some stranger at school who thinks he knows what’s best for me? This is what that child thinks.

If parents are disconnected, their children will be too.

Ignorance is not concentrated by skin color or ethnicity, in contrast with studies. It follows parents’s social norms, traditions, culture, mentality.

It is a vicious cycle. Once one set of parents decide to let the guard down in educating their children, an entire ignorant population may be produced.

It only takes two people to wipe out the progress that took thousands of years to make.

So today I call for a new revolution! A revolution of parental education! Start with offering pedagogical classes to high school students, then offer free parent-teacher classes to those whose children are behind at school. The bottom line is if a child is behind academically, the chances are his parents are the cause, and the child is the effect.

So let’s stop treating the symptoms, and start curing the disease of ignorance by educating parents on how to educate themselves on educating their children.

Having children carries the highest social responsibility, and parents must be held accountable for deciding to have them.

Julia’s Smile

I smile to tell you

That I will not object,

I am bound to obey you.

I smile to show you

That I will not offend,

I pose no danger, because I am hollow.

My body, my sacred temple,

Has been scrubbed and washed,

To numb the pain, ignore my mind.

My smile of innocence is really

My armor, raised to protect me

From your kind.

I smile to lie, because I hate you smiling,

But I’ll survive as I did before,

I love no more, I only smile,

I seek your care, love, attention,

Forgive me, if I am stupid, if I’m wrong,

I have no way of knowing, how you feel.

I laugh to let you know I am smiling,

I cry to show you that I am hurt,

The words have little application.

So I’ve been trained

To keep my mouth shut.

I will not argue, I will accept.

Humility I must express, and please the world,

I must enjoy the shackles of tradition,

And smile at you, because you claimed me first.

Please help me,

Show me how to love,

Please tame this beast within my cage.

I am trained to owe my very being,

To those who fed and clothed me,

Who told me how to behave and live,

Who tossed my character aside,

As if defected, contaminated

I had to be assimilated,

A Bonsai tree, to entertain,

To follow followers’ orders,

To be submissive, and to smile

I must be thankful for the life,

That has no meaning,

I have to smile, I must respect,

I have no meaningful opinion,

I must adjust, adhere and endure,

To show you my appreciation,

I smile, because I am dead inside.

Please don’t be mad,

I know, I don’t deserve to be alive,

I am your curse, your pain and failure,

I smile to beg for your forgiveness,

I smile to make you happy,

I smile to serve you, and consume

The toxic fumes you emanate,

I must not think that you are human,

You never err, regret or fail,

I must forget that I am different,

Because you bore me, I am yours forever.

I smile, to prove you I still exist,

I smile,

Because you threaten to disown me,

I smile, but I forgive you for the war,

That ravaged me since I was born.

Chapter One (cont.)

“Zinaida is right” I started typing the response to my mom’s text. “She expressed her opinion based on her personal experience in the subject matter. She appears to have learnt what constitutes a lack of respect and attention towards her own parents; now that she is older and seeks the same from her children, she demands it the same way her parents did… which, at that time, prompted her to distance herself from them. Now, she probably feels guilty about her actions in the past but instead of admitting it and sharing the enlightenment, she chose to continue to promote demanding respect, attention and care just like her parents did. To leverage it, she uses the same premise: juxtaposition of pregnancy, birth and upbringing against the life of a child who apparently signed off on a contract which laid out terms and conditions of payback for the care, love and energy it took to raise this child.

Now that the child is grown and moved on, the parent(s) seek to collect “dividends” often resorting to blackmailing their children and their families in an effort to “pry their minds open” and thrust their aging issues in the face at every opportunity.

Naturally rejected by their children for the position of a family demagogue, out of frustration, the parents direct their lifelong accumulated anger, sorrow and toxic guilt upon their children. There, also, comes blame for everything that have ever gone wrong in their lives.

But, at the core of it is a hardened shell of vulnerable ignorance that has been dormant until it got disturbed. And for this disturbance, the parents become angry. “How dare you!” they exclaim “I gave you life! You are so ungrateful!” Then, there is “Damned be you and your family!”

I quickly reviewed the text and finally sent the text message. I had to go pee really bad.

[50 min later]

I totally forgot about it. Or didn’t want to think about it. I had a feeling my mom would write something nasty. I grabbed the phone to see if she answered. She did. It wasn’t pretty.

“You are a loser! A lazy fuck, a monster who hides behind your wife! You have never amounted to anything in life! Damn be you! You have destroyed my life. You are the reason I am miserable. I wish you had never been born! How dare you speak to your mother like this!”

I took a deep breath. I exhaled slowly and deliberately. I don’t know why but it felt good. Then, I did it again.

“I forgive you” I replied.

“I will never forgive you!” she wrote back.

“Why are you so mad at me? How exactly did I ruin your life? I am forty years old, I have been happily married for the last twenty years, I have two amazing children, I own a business. How am I a loser, a lazy fuck and a monster? It is you who is retired, married to a lonely, disabled, old guy in hopes that one day you get to inherit his government-subsidized apartment, blames everyone around you for all the wrong choices you have ever made. Something tells me I am the only one left willing to listen…” I took another deep breath, exhaled slowly and sent the message.

“Fuck you! Did you already forget how you insulted me in front of the lowlives? How I wanted to sit down with you and speak face to face? You are not a son to me! You are trash and always have been!” she wrote.

I was starting to run out of air.

“I feel your pain” I replied. “But I don’t think I am the problem. You have suppressed issues. I am willing to hear you out. Please know that I do not hold any grudges against you and if you feel guilty towards me, please don’t. I am fine. I forgive you for everything nasty thing you have ever said about me, my dad, my wife, my family. This is what a loving son does. I think you are unable to admit to yourself how much you fucked up in life, and it weighs heavy on you. I get it. I don’t want you to blame yourself, it is not your fault that you haven’t been able to figure out life by the retirement age. You simply were not taught the necessary skills. You did your best. You did better than your parents did” I wrote and sent the message.

I took another gasp of air. There was no reply.

“You are being too harsh on yourself” I quickly wrote and sent another message.

The last text message bubble turned color green instead of the usual blue iMessage one. I realized she must have blocked my number.

Chapter One

The Soviet Way

It looked like a Facebook video link. The thumbnail picture depicted a middle-aged woman looking at the camera. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t stern either. She looked rather judgmental. Her chin was up, her head was slightly tilted to the left, and her eyes appeared to look down on you. She had a white evening dress on. She was squeezed between some people. The bodies of the two individuals were partially in the picture, not enough to make out their gender though. Behind the woman, there was a filing cabinet?! Maybe it is a picture from an office party? From the 90’s? Or somewhere in Brighton Beach? There was a caption in Russian. It was her name: Zinaida Badhan. Being of middle age, she must have been born and raised in Communist Soviet Union…

I clicked on the link.

It took me to a Facebook page where this woman appeared to have authored an article about children’s obligatory duties towards their parents.

My mom texted me this link. Here we go again, I thought.

Zinaida stated that children were ultimately in debt before their parents for being born, raised, fed, clothed and cared for. Zinaida didn’t hide her disdain for children who abandoned their parents.

I hesitated. I always do, before deciding to respond, in a civil and respectful manner, to the text message apparently sent to remind me about my duties to awaken some love and trigger guilt and shame for my behavior. This is how my mom expresses her love to me.

Fuck it! I’ll respond. After all, conflict is a good thing! It ripens an argument faster. Conflict is a duel. Either, one of you walks away with a “saved” dignity, or both become irreparably damaged.

[to be continued]