Violent attack

Violent attack

The attack launched on a playgroup on Jl. Hasanudin, Bandung,
West Java, at 10 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1998 reminds me of Fukuyama, an
American philosopher, who wrote an article titled Barbarians at
the gate.

In Pikiran Rakyat daily, this attack was reported under the
title Parents engaged in dispute, children neglected, which
euphemistically suggests tolerance and forgiveness. This title
reminds me of the novel Quality of Mercy, which dwells on how
easily the community forgets atrocities, violence and barbarism.
Every day misery is exposed in newspapers in polished language in
such a way that atrocities and violence may one day no longer be
horrible to a sane person.

I am the father of a three-year-old child who has attended
Tadika Puri playgroup, Jl. Hasanudin, Bandung, for a month.

When he first started at the playgroup, I was intoxicated with
happiness. Wearing the uniform of Tadika Puri playgroup, my child
smiled broadly. He liked learning how to eat a meal properly and
how to socialize with his friends.

However, on Aug. 3, 1998, I found him trembling with fear. He
told me a lot about bad guys. He told me about three truckloads
of monsters attacking his school and pelting stones at the
windows and the walls of the school. It was 10 a.m.

Now, my three-year-old child has missed the meaning of vice
and virtue. His spotlessly clean memory is now smeared with the
violent attacks perpetrated by three truckloads of monsters while
he and his friends, between the ages of 20 and 50 months, were
learning how to eat properly.

Now my three-year-old child has lost the significance of
respect for his grandparents. At a very delicately young age he
saw with his own eyes how a grandmother waiting for her
grandchild fell in front of the school gate and then rolled down
the stairs as the heinously brutal monsters attacked the
building.

Now my three-year-old child does not know why his school, the
place where he learns how to eat properly, was attacked by three
truckloads of monsters. He does not know what has gone wrong with
the place where he learns how to eat properly.

It is too soon, perhaps, to assess what crisis our fellow
countrymen find themselves in now. It is too soon to discover why
they can so easily abandon their sanity and readily turn into
violent and cruel monsters.

My young child is now waiting for the Power Rangers because he
will never know whether the police force and the Armed Forces can
still be trusted to provide small children like him with a
feeling of security.

JUSMAN SD

Bandung