|
PEACE will come to the world a lot sooner when child
abuse goes. Peace is planted when children’s rights are respected
and children are given affirmation, respect, love, good example and
protection from abuse. Peace is not just the absence of abuse,
violence and war. Nor is it the silence of the graveyard or the
inactivity and apathy of the non-involved. Peace-filled living is a
way of life. It is a positive caring attitude of one human person to
another where rights and dignity are respected and cherished,
nurtured and protected.
When children experience from
early childhood that they are valued and have intrinsic worth, they
grow up respecting and caring for others. Such values are planted
during childhood by caring intelligent adults who understand how
important is affirmation, admiration and a peaceful environment for
children to grow as persons and to develop a conscience.
That sensitivity and knowledge of
right and wrong, true and false, good and bad, and the desire and
eventual ability to freely choose and embrace “the good,” for
oneself and others is the path to human development. Wise parents
know too the lifelong personality damage that is caused by emotional
and verbal violence in a family or community. They know too that
physical punishment and maltreatment do the most damage of all.
Perhaps that is what turns a
loving child into a teenage or adult hater of humanity. It could
start with excessive parental discipline, unjust harsh punishment
and abuse. Such abuse or rejection and exclusion at home, in school,
or in the community builds the lonely, isolated personality that
hates others because he or she is unwanted and unloved, scorned,
laughed at, ridiculed in public, bullied or put down. Some desire to
take revenge, conquer all around them and be feared as a powerful
person. They can rejoice in the role of a cruel, avenging tyrant.
These fantasies may spill over
into emotions of hatred and contempt for others. Some become
psychopaths and some desire to immortalize themselves through
violence, atrocities and mass murder, awe and shock as a tactic to
be the center of attention.
From the dark lonely isolation of rejection, the pain of abuse and
violence come the revenge-seeking psychopaths of this world. These
are the abusers and killers that become mass murderers, tyrants,
despots and dictators that rule with death squads, secret police,
and start wars to satisfy their own egoistical need to be recognized
and feared. Their imagined superiority and contempt for all others
drive them to dominate and get pleasure from inflicting pain and
death on others.
History is full of psychopaths from the past to the present: Stalin,
Idi Amin, Hitler, the Columbine school killers, the maundering
murderers and rapists of Darfur, the torturers and genocidal killers
and leaders of Bosnia, Rwanda, Burma, the Ivory Coast and the Congo
and countless others in the past and the present.
The Philippines, a nation of
peaceful and friendly people is plagued by a culture of violence.
Where it came from one cannot know but the violence of the colonial
rulers in the childhood of the nation may have tainted their
successors. The dominating elite controls all with the iron fists of
poverty, hunger, death squads, torture, lies and empty promises.
The People’s Power movement in 1986 was the nonviolent answer of
peace-loving Filipinos to the martial law killers and torturers.
Today, they still make up the majority of the population, but they
await a messianic leader to ignite their hopes for peace and
prosperity and an end to poverty.
In Philippine jails, punitive
power prevails and teenagers are abused and brutalized. Unless
released and helped they will grow up filled with anger and
hostility to society. They are now innocent but will be turned by
unjust punishment into the rebels of the future from the abuse they
receive today.
The ruling elite will reap what
they sow, they allow the abuse of children and youth behind bars and
when the children become adults many will return with a burning
desire for justice. They will not find justice, and then what? We
have to stop this madness and make peace now through justice for
children and youth.
|
