More Than Meets The News

Recently we Malaysians were shocked by a tragedy that happened in Pasir Besar, Negeri Sembilan. A teenager beat up his parents – killing his mother – just for being told to lower the TV volume. He then tried to dispose his mother’s corpse by ditching her into a ledge nearby.

It’s a sad and disturbing story. and I won’t go into details. for the uninitiated, click here.

What I’m trying to convey is, how the media simply conclude the story: the teenager was a drug addict, so go figure. I don’t support drug abuse, but I resent the conclusion made.

I don’t believe an incident is any one’s fault. It’s a group of faults and causes leading to another. I call this a cascading (or domino) effect. Simply put, any incident is caused by another incident caused by another. It’s a chain reaction of incidents.

When the media slams the teenager of being a drug addict before (he quitted about a year ago, according to a report), they (the media) lost the big picture, as I see it. Nobody ever question what make the teenager as aggressive as that? Nobody ever question what’s plying in his mind (it is also reported that he’s the silent, keep-it-to-himself person. He also was reported to have quite a temper).

Okay, let’s do a reverse deductive case study, starting with the tragedy. He lost it after being told by his father to lower the TV’s volume. They got into a heated argument. This shows that the teenager have been keeping something in him for quite some time.

Then came the fact that he was a drug addict. He stopped a year ago. An indication of him having a problem much earlier. Either him being a drug addict as pure peer pressure, or there’s something more. I’d like to believe that he had some kind of a problem since school, mixed the wrong friends, got into the wrong activities, realized he’d done wrong, stopped, but still keeping his problems to himself, lost it, an did something very-very wrong. Purposely killing your own parents (or anybody else) is not the working of someone sane. But he did try to dispose his mother’s corpse, and that made me less sympathetic. Maybe it was like what is reported. a simple, no-brainer case of hot temper with a history of illegal substance abuse.

Yes, what he did is extremely wrong, and still being in the month of Syawal, I can’t help but being disturbed. I’m sure a lot of you out there feel the same thing. But surely, as in most cases, there’s more than meets the News, or so I thought.

Maybe the media tries to emphasize the effects of drugs on your life. Be that the case, I agree.

F**k drugs, do blogs instead (both equally addictive!).