Yesterday I read this article.
It’s an article that has a video of a man who threw his 3 year old step daughter into a hotel pool and watched as she struggled to stay above water, eventually drowning. All this while her mom was sleeping in the hotel room. I can’t imagine what the mom must have woken up to.
There’s a video attached to the article but I couldn’t get myself to watch it. Just looking at the pictures alone was heartbreaking enough. So heartbreaking I even had a nightmare in my dreams last night after reading the article.
Before I had kids, watching the news about how kids get harmed as collateral damage whether to war or abusive parents used to affect me but all that is nothing compared to how I feel now that I have kids. Maybe it hurts me more now because I imagine “What if it was my kids”.
Whether it’s looking at the picture of the Syrian refugee boy who washed up on a beach, to a video on CNN of how a little girl got hit by a bomb blast, it stabs me like a knife to the heart.
Once I go through that shock and pain, anger seeps in. Angry that there are people that exist in this world who would harm kids that have nothing but innocence on them. I then ask myself why does God allow these kind of things happen to children who have done nothing to deserve the pain they go through? Children who hadn’t had the chance to live through life long enough to see the good and the bad that exist in this world.
I feel like there should be harsher punishments for crimes against children. That for this man here who drowned the 3 year old girl, even a 100 year prison term isn’t harsh enough.
Why does the world we live in have so much violence? How can we leave a better world for our kids to grow up in?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space