Hazy
What horizon?! I see none. I literally cannot even see my feet. Thought yesterday was worse but others beg to differ. It rained last night – obviously that didn’t help. The fire that broke in Sumatera in an area the size of Singapore has not been mitigated, so I have been told. For one thing it was inaccessible, for another how much water would you then need to put it off? But surely we have all these chemicals and high tech apparatus to seed the cloud and induce rainfall don’t we? Why not apply those?In the midst of all these talk about the API (NB: Not RE’s API density), free N95 and above masks, health advice and TsuMawi becoming the male Siti Nurhaliza, is another hot topic – bonus. To be honest, I couldn’t care less. Not that I’m getting any, that’s why. If the system were less of a twat (oops… did I just say that?), RM2250X5/4 would be in the bag. How much is that? Yeah, that’s 2812.50 before EPF and Socso deductions and more than my measly monthly wage.
I shouldn’t complain really. I saw BersamaMu on TV3 on Monday (after conscientiously coaxing my sister into watch it and not flick the channel to AxN, StarWorld or HBO) and it became my dose of reality for the week. The guy earns 400 odd ringgit a month cleaning buildings. FYI, that’s how much I spend on food for the same duration and I’m a single mid twenties lady. He has a family which constitutes 3 schooling children, The 12-year-old son works part-time, collecting scrap steel to help the parents make ends meet. The mom is 7 months pregnant and does the same job. Now I have several crucial questions that I wish to deliberate on and I purposefully am asking this here with a clear intent of resonating my sentiment to whoever’s reading this. And hopefully, something could and would be done to reduce, if not end, the misery and sufferings of certain quarters of our increasingly oblivious and underbalanced society. And for those of you who are still a bit thick, by this I really mean PLEASE DONATE!!
1) Can’t the Dad do better? I know of tens of jobs less or more laborious, either way, pays better.
2) Why isn’t there such thing the developed world refers to as Minimum Wage in this country? If it is in place, why haven’t I heard about it ever? And this is coming not from a Paris Hilton wannabe but someone who is quite conscious about social issues and welfare of the people (but am not conscious enough to make a difference… shame on me! Slap own face 2x)
3) Why are poor families normally (maybe not this particular family) huge? I mean come on now… please don’t politicise the lack of education. There had been people (in the olden times) who family-plan without ever stepping into a classroom, you know? If you can’t afford it, don’t do it. Then again, it’s a bit unfair of me to deny people their basic instinct right?
4) Why are kids so mean sometimes? And how come it’s so easy for them to escape unscathed? What kind of kids are we raising these days? Here are three poor children struggling to do the most basic thing i.e. survive (btw, the kids do their homework in the dark), but rather than hinting at empathy or solidarity, you have the more privileged kids taunting and jeering at them merely because they look as though they haven’t bathed. Needless to say, they look like that as a repercussion of their sad financial standing hence, living condition, never by choice.
5) What are the rich doing?
6) What are we doing? Are we doing enough?
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