I am 67 years old. My one and only child, a daughter called Sakineh, is 32 years old. She got married in her mid 20s and now has a beautiful daughter, called Roghieh, who is 3 years old – having just started to speak.
My wife had a phone call from Sakineh today. Here is what my wife reported to me after her telephone conversation with our daughter:
[Sakineh called today. Apparently Roghieh told her “Mummy, sometimes I don’t like you”. Sakineh responded ”That hurts Mummy’s feelings. You should apologize”. Of course, Roghieh does not yet know the concept of “hurting someone’s feelings”, let alone the concept of “apology”. So, apparently Roghieh runs to her room without an apology and gets on playing with her toys. Having heard the conversation, Sakineh’s husband (i.e. Roghieh’s father = our son-in-law) tells Roghieh to go and tell her mother “I am sorry” – which she dutifully does. But that “I am sorry” statement did not seem sincere enough to Sakineh. Sakineh said: How can that “little s#*t” tell me “Mummy, sometimes I don’t like you?” after all I have done and doing for her]
After some laughter with my wife about “growing up pains” and remembering what Sakineh herself was like when she was only 3 years old, I told my wife: If I was Sakineh, I would have told Roghieh “honey, you have a right to free speech, but if you are in a cinema watching your cartoons, and suddenly you shout FIRE!, when there is no fire, then you will be arrested and taken to prison”. I think Sakineh responded based on her emotion and bruised ego rather than using logic to educate the child. By her reaction, Sakineh just created a sense of “guilt” which is the genetic stuff of some religions – Oh Lord, we are all sinners.
“What are you talking about” said my wife. “at age 3 you expect the poor little Roghieh to be educated in the first amendment of the US Constitution/Bill of Rights?! For peat’s sake. she is only 3 yeas old”.
“That is how brainwashing starts” I responded calmly. “As a pair of staunch atheist parents, we sent Sakineh to a special school where she had to read the Bible in French, read the Torah in Hebrew, read the Qoran in Arabic, and read the Buddhist manifesto in English – and pass exams in all of them. We did that so that Sakineh can grow up and make up her own mind/choice, rather than merely/blindly following her parent’s secular/atheistic beliefs. I told her that as a Persian, looking across the past 4,000 years of human brain evolution and genetic inheritance, we tried our best not to bring up a brainwashed girl into this world. After the appearance of Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and the Arab invasion of Persia some 1400 years ago (which is lasting through today), I suppose we could not control the passing of the of stone-age-mentality genes.
At that point, my wife gave up, without rolling up her eyes – which she normally does — implying that I am merely a ranting, grumpy old man.
