I have always wondered if there is a strange corelation
between the way children and politicians behave. When I delved further into the
subject, there was so much more than met the eye that it was amusing. Since I
am a writer and an educationist, it made it easier to tally the similarities.
“Every child is gifted – they just unwrap their packages
at different times.”
Have you seen how some children react faster to
situations, while others meander their way through life. There are the A-listers
who are fiercely competitive and feel they know everything that is there to
know. They need to clamber to the top of the class and their motto is, “I am
the BEST! I just know it.” They need to answer every question till finally they
are told to pipe down.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Visualise that flamboyant
politician who struts around announcing, “I rule and my Party rules! (Whether I
follow the rules or not!) He goes about giving bombastic speeches about
everything that his party has been doing for the public. (Things that sometimes
do not even trickle down to the ‘grass root’ levels, another oft-bandied term.
There are those children who are street-smart. They know
their IQ levels and that they will not be able to get further unless they use
other methods. Hence, they resort to manipulation is tiny ways – telling tall
tales and playing favourites.
How well does that
relate to those in the political arena (an extremely apt term!)? Warriors
determined to sledge it out, bringing opponents down through innuendo and back-biting,
using the limits of their imagination to discredit all those who do not belong
to their party by creating controversies that may or may not be true. (Often
the latter!)
The list goes on…
Freebies are synonymous with political promises, where combatants from various parties hand out enticing incentives to the general populace, hoping that every bit adds on to extra votes. The rabid followers get even more fervent, shouting slogans in support of their generous leaders. The ignorant settle for the gifts and vote for the donors without even exercising their political brain cells, if they have any. One cannot blame those below the poverty line when they excitedly vie to collect their freebies. The significance of giving away their votes is lost to them.
Horse trading, in the good old days, meant the buying and
selling of horses. Today, in politics, the term has burgeoned to mean “shrewd
and hard bargaining” where the horses and mules are of the two-legged variety. Politicians
see-saw around, hopping on the bandwagon of whichever party offers them more. It
is sad when the sons and daughters of stalwarts from a certain party suddenly
decide to abandon the age-old principles of their parents and springboard on to
a new party that is only trying to add on to its numbers. Quantity over quality,
certainly! Loyalty, which was something so vital in bygone days, has now become
expendable.
COVID-19 brought in its wake numerous problems, the
biggest one being the health issue, of course. In schools, too, the problems were myriad.
After two years of online classes, when children returned to school, they had
regressed almost five years. Gone were their social skills, their willingness
to sit in classrooms, their interaction with adults and peers, and most of all,
their self-confidence. It has taken almost four years to bring them back to a
semblance of what they would otherwise have been. The biggest issue is their
addiction to devices, and their realization that there is a whole wide world
(web) which can be accessed and used or misused.
Our children are more adept at using their devices,
having been born using them. Certainly much more than the older generations who
had to adapt to a world of social media much later in their lives. In schools,
cyber bullying has reached a level where the sufferers end up being
traumatised. Body shaming, jibes about IQ levels and using terms like ‘idiot’, ‘moron’
and the like, isolating or ignoring children who are different, sexual conversations,
a dive into the dark web… these are only a few issues that have sprung up over
the past few years, but it is vital that they are nipped in the bud. Children,
today, have also become extremely sensitive, but they cannot be blamed because they
face an entirely different kind of world as opposed to the rest of us who grew
up in a kinder, less complicated one.
Cyber bullying has turned rampant in the world of politics as well. It is believed that platforms like Twitter have specially hired social media experts who send out politically motivated tweets, countering and insulting the doings of rival parties. Thousands of tweets go out at regular intervals, laced with invective, aimed at brainwashing thousands of gullible readers. As Vladimir Lenin said succinctly,
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
It is almost impossible to find the source of these tweets, since there are so many of them, all saying the same thing in so forceful a manner that it sticks on in the minds of people.
Myron Fagan defined politics in a unique fashion – “Politics:
‘Poly’ a Latin word meaning ‘many’ and ‘tics’ meaning ‘blood-sucking creatures’.
While I do not subscribe to that definition, as we have
had numerous effective statemen over the decades, along with a few well-meaning
politicians even today who actually want to do their country proud by working
for the good of its citizens, there is a breed that brings down the standard of
the rest. Unfortunately, it is these that stand out like a black dot on white
paper.
“Politics are about power: we cannot evade that truth or
its consequences. We dream of a better world, but it is in Utopia – that is,
nowhere.”
D W
Brogan
