Save yourselves from the abyss!

Abdu Khal
Okaz newspaper
 
A FEW days ago, local newspapers published a report about the tragic death of a girl who was left in a car by her parents at the end of a leisure trip.

According to the report, the child’s parents had forgotten to take the girl with them when they got out of the car. They went inside the house and slept and left the girl sleeping in the back of the car. The next day, the father discovered the girl had died from suffocation.

This is the latest of such incidents. We have heard similar stories before. There were stories of children being left in commercial centers or inside restaurants or at the gates of schools. There were also cases where parents drove away and accidentally left their children behind on the streets.

When we remember this forgetfulness without addressing its causes, it makes great news for us, because we automatically ask how parents can forget their own children. Is there any convincing explanation for such forgetfulness? Have our preoccupations reached such a level that we are no longer in a position to pay attention to who is present or missing?

Before giving an answer to this question, we have to examine the situation inside our homes. Many of us complain modern technology is responsible for separation among family members. There is a typical situation in almost all families wherein the household members are living together but each one of them is isolated from the other because they are glued to various electronic devices.

All are busy sending or receiving text messages. They are together physically, but far apart in other senses.

When one of us speaks, apparently the other member does not listen. If one asks anything, the other does not answer. If one wants to sit together, the other may not be ready to do so.

In such an atmosphere, the warmth of intimacy disappears to the extent that some families no longer get together to eat a meal or watch TV (especially in the case of those families where each member has a TV in his or her room).

This gets to the point when we call each other using our phones even if all of us live under the same roof. Most often this is the case in many of our modern households. In such situations, the absence of one member of the family is not striking for the others. The presence of each member of the family inside the house is taken for granted, no matter our physical or emotional detachment from each other. And this is the prevailing sentiment.
Because of this lack of collective participation in our daily lives, instances of forgetting a child or not noticing the absence of a son or any other family members could happen.

Perhaps this justification would give relief to the vast majority of us. But the reality is that we are keeping distance from our children and vice versa. If we do not work out plans at a family level to revive the warmth of intimacy that has been lost inside our homes, then the resulting loss will not be restricted to a physical one, but will be on an emotional and an ethical level as well.

Enough is enough. We have to safeguard the nucleus of society — the family — by returning to normal routines and maintaining a real presence inside our homes. We must change our ways so that our lives do not revolve around electronic devices, devoid of the warmth and intimacy of family relationships.