Respect Parents Same As Traffic Lights

Respect elders. You'll be one, one day.

We are born of parents. Babies rely on mother’s milk for sustenance, and solid food like pumpkin later on. Baby grows up to be 16 and discovers the outside world through his cellphone. It seems more exciting than being told to wash your plate when you are done eating. Damn! It sounds perfect that once you are grown up you don’t have to do zilch at home and listen to anybody. Parents, what parents?

We make a mistake when we enumerate parents: two individuals, mom and dad. Parents might irritate us by saying do this, don’t do that, but we never question the same demands from other people and things. Traffic lights are parents because they say proceed when the light is green, and stop right there when it is red. We knock at the Vice Chairman’s office and understand when her personal secretary (PA) says we cannot see her because we don’t have an appointment.

We try and get a drink at the hotel bar but we can’t, because the barman wants the I.D. to prove that we are over 18. These situations are not our parents but they are controlling. They have a, it’s-for-your-own-good element but what is strange is that we don’t see it that way. We accept their authority without question. We avoid texting and driving because we might kill people in a accident but survive with one leg, to tell the story how the other leg got amputated. We were texting and driving.

Parents’ rules and employers’ rules are not perfect mind you. You work in a place where some workers get away with murder, but you are asked why your are ten minutes late. That is bad and unfair, but it is a reminder that parents’ rules are not a pain. They are how the world works. Instructions. Rules. Directions, you name it. Birds understand it. That is why there’s an Igbo language proverb, that birds don’t collide in the sky. It’s not a parents’ rule. It’s a survival fact.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

Executive Blogger