By Professor Daizal Samad
I HAVE had the honour of speaking at close with those that guide and perchance teach our children. We spoke of Vincent Van Gogh, that great Dutch impressionist painter of the 19th century. We spoke of things such as seeing and interpretation and our teachers ventured (having checked the internet, of course) about Van Gogh’s “madness.”And yet, the entire world of knowledgeable people, those that have taste and intellect, would tell us that Van Gogh was sheer genius. In our country, we cannot assess such genius. However, we would be quite good at measuring the dollars and cents and pounds and francs and dirhams and rials and so. Easy internet stuff. Go to Google money exchange and we sit agape at the money. Value for us is always to be measured by the money.

While our great academics babble about Jim Reeves and Bobby Vinton and Slim Whitman and much more ordinary people, Van Gogh is lost. Michelangelo is lost. The greats are dead and gone. We would understand clearly if we are told that the latest painting by Van Gogh was auctioned off for 12 million U.S. dollars.

There are those famous “death announcements” that play the most horrible stuff. We must admit, however, that there are times when they play (with photos on the screen, of course) really good stuff. Things like “You lift me up” by Gosh Grobin–that fine tenor, his voice strangely ripened at twenty-something years old, when tenors usually ripen at 40-plus. Like Pavarotti or Bocellie.

We are equally blind to that which we are shown by our children. If all you righteous people out there remember, The Nazarene said thus: “Suffer Not the Children to Come onto me, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”. Let’s bring it home.

As I sit upon my veranda, listening to reports and trying not to give advice, I behold five children at play upon the slip of road. The children are of various ages, ranging from 12 to 5 or 6. They vary in skin colour and hair texture, no two the same. They vary in gender, three boys and two girls. A small van passes by, selling ice cream and icicles and “fruity.” The child of 12 or so rushes in to her yard and extracts a few dollars from her mother. She is given enough to buy a single icicle for herself. Maybe mimicking her teachers, she lines up the younger ones of varying hair texture and skin colours and genders.

Her hair, pig-tailed, stringing down her back, she bites away a corner of the plastic that covers the icicle. She takes the first taste of what seems to be the strawberry-flavoured frozen treat, a thing welcomed in this blazing weather. Then she passes it to each other child, one by one that they too may taste and be refreshed. And when it comes back to her, she places it in her lovely mouth and finishes it.

All is well then, because she has set an example beyond words and ethnicity and gender and age and any of those things that we adults use to contaminate our children. But she shall be made to grow up with all the nasty biases and selfishness that we so generously impart. The best teachers are our children, for they do but see with innocent and whole eyes. And we, murderously blind, lead them to destruction and self-annihilation.