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