Family matters?

Yesterday, with mind silenced by fragrant words from the flower that brightens the garden of my imperfections, I walked my township streets; morning slippers celebrating the freedom of traveling wherever by picking up layers of dust as mementos; heart beating compositions heard from the realm that exists beyond love.  Every now and the dodging taxis, carrying the tired unappreciated workforce of the white owned town, driven wildly by young black men attempting to escape their present; ears enchanted by the choir of loud voices abusing the air, as if announcing their significance to maps that reduced their existence to a mere dot on a colored paper.

 

Then voices from the owners of the township streets knocked me off-balance and the silent mind was no more.  I observed a group of young girls, grade four or five, spewing malicious words that flew from the streets to invade households, their faces glowing with delight as they told the world who their next victim would be.  Onwards I looked as they ran towards their victim, just as them she looked like a young girl with fragile hands easily bruised by holding pens at school.  I turned away from them, not wanting to adorn their ceremony with my energy and walked on wandering what had changed.

 

My troubled spirit turned teacher posed this question to a class of thoughts and only one stood proudly up to answer:

          Thought: ‘It should be noted that every culture has a very fragile balance maintained by their practices.  With the introduction of rights of children and banishment of corporal punishment, most black parents’ hands were tide.  This is not to say corporal punishment is right, but to say that it was a tool used in the maintenance of the balance.  When it was removed the balance was compromised and disorder reigned.  The error was that in the removal of this tool, the users of the tool were never taught how to use another tool and so the imbalance persists.’

 

Beyond all I still find instilled in me that even when I step out of my home and into the streets, that those elder than me are still my parents and should be respected as such.  Then again it is said that times have changed, so I ask: ‘In these days where parents’ work demands that they leave their children behind to be raised by TV; days when children raise children; when alleged child on child rape accusations arise from school premises only later to be found to be consensual sexual intercourse between minors on school premises; when children pornographic materials are found in the possession of primary teachers’ hands and when alcohol is the preferred beverage among primary school children.  Are all these indicators of men’s evolution, or times that have changed and if so, does family still matter or are all these just family matters?