13. Hands

A sculpture of a big hand, one meter long, holding the figures of 3 girls, in a cemetery in a town in Spain.

That hand is us, our bright side, the nurturing human beings holding the future, warming the path for the next generations.

Often the hand turns dark and does just the opposite. Abused children, terrorized children, by adults who were abused and terrorized when they were children.

This wheel of suffering can only be stopped by promoting a combination of an individual and a collective conscience. Both together or nothing changes. Societies based on the individual fail and will fail. Parents who claim they are ultimately responsible for their children, justifying abuses on them. Kids without protection until they are 16, 18 years old until it is way too late.

Life is designed during the first years of children’s life. After those first few years, children do what they can and become what they can, within the limits of what their parents and their context have set up for them.

Have children abused and terrorized, and you will have the next generation’s children abused and terrorized. No matter how hard you fight to get the death sentence for criminals who perpetrate crimes against children. The original crime was perpetrated on them, and on their parents before, and so on.

I was reading about the passing away of those three teenagers in Spain in the early 1990s. They were abused and terrorized by at least three men. I wonder about the past of those men. Who would choose to become that? You do not choose that. When doing that is one of the options in your mind, something was definitely not right in your childhood. You were not properly accompanied. It does not make you innocent, of course. You are innocent at a certain point in your life and guilty at another point in your life. What happened between innocence and guiltiness?

We should research that transition. From a pure child to a failed adult. Protect the children from the adults, to prevent the adult from becoming a failure.

I do my best to nurture my daughter’s empathy and self-respect. Will it be enough? Will social life also nurture? Will this sickly competitive society that surrounds us these days, with its values of individualism, material overambition, and superficial souls, treat our children well enough in their transition towards adulthood? Will empathy prevail before narcissism? I really hope so, for the sake of all the children of the future.