By Ted Malanda
Human beings are a weird species. They take considerable trouble planning for things that hardly matter — like funerals — and neglect things that should be a matter of life and death.
That is why a man spends millions constructing a house and then attempts to save money by investing in a bed that creaks, a flimsy door and the cheapest lock in the market.
Never mind that the same fellow spent 20 years schooling, yet all available evidence suggests that only doctors apply the stuff they learn in college. And we can’t even be too sure about that.
Finest quality
We are a species that spends hours shopping for the perfect shoe and plotting for a perfect weekend party. We spend months going over a house plan and years planning a wedding. When we buy a car, it must be a machine made to ‘manufacturer’s specifications’.
When we buy furniture, we ensure the wood and fabric are of the finest quality and made to survive long after we have expired.
We spend years sweating and stealing money we would never spend in our lifetime. But far from giving a bit of it to charity, say a noble cause like mental health or cancer, we stuff it in the bank, splash it on pieces of land we don’t need, and pirate the rest offshore.
And then, when our joints start creaking, we turn over to the loyal wife, sigh, and whisper, “Mama Baby, to whom will we leave all these things to?”
The wife, having seen it all, says, “Leave it to the Lord, Baba Baby.”
Now, when a wife says that, be sure your goose is cooked. What she means, in the circumspect manner that wives are fond of speaking, is that you will be lucky to find a screwdriver that you owned barely months after your death. Your children will fight and squander it all, even before you are sure whether you are really dead or it was just a bad dream.
But why shouldn’t they, when we approach baby making without the due diligence that we exercise when we are buying a piece of land, a kilo of meat or a shoe? We have delegated the whole process associated with baby making to love, when we know fully well that it is blind.
Unfortunately, love is a good thing, but it can’t neuter a thieving or murderous gene, not when it is lodged somewhere in the DNA of the people who make our hearts flutter.
Don’t doubt it. The world would have been a much better place if babies were purchased in supermarkets.
If short of money, one could secure a sturdy second-hand one. If one were a thief, or a genius, they could order one just like them and be rid of the perennial guesswork that is looking at children and wondering, “Will they turn out right?”
Unfortunately, like most purchases, they could end up to be fake Chinese goods. And like with children, goods once sold cannot be returned.
