“I Want To Sit Under a Banyan Tree When I Grow Up.”
June 19th, 2007All my friends will tell you what an acute social conscience I have. When I chuck empty glass coffee jars in with the rest of the trash, I wince. When I go round the apartment leaving lamps switched on because it is so very awkward having to fiddle for their switches in the dark, I say to myself, “I really shouldn’t do this.â€
So when the Chief Executive announced that he foresaw Hong Kong with a population of 10 million in quite a short time, I decided to roll my sleeves up and pitch in for the community.
After all, the current breeding population, by itself, cannot be expected to do much more. Young men these days seem unaccountably skinny with their pants hanging off their arses and so depressed they go out in the mornings with their hair straight off the pillow.. Young women, with a preference for the lank look and fashionable clothing that doesn’t seem to end anywhere in particular, hardly help the falling births and might explain the suspected rocket in the rate of male homosexuality.
I am old but bold and ready to do my bit, poor woman. Yet I have to be realistic. No one of child bearing age should be asked to accept my contribution to the population face to face. So we will have to go down the route of tubes from plastic jars to whatever goes on at the other end. She should be assured though that it is good stuff.
With international school debentures likely to cost her and her exhausted, anemic husband up to $3 million week hear this week, she will be getting good stock, well worth the expenditure later. On the other hand, the child might not work out as budgeted for.
I did go to one of the best schools in Britain and finest universities in the world, yet look at the ‘business card’. There is no PhD., no LL.B., no MD., I am not even an accountant and there is very little business being done, believe me.
So you see that attempting to turn your child into a profitable bundle of bourgeois bullion from birth is a perilous investment. It cannot take into account the little person’s soul which may prompt it to say, eventually, “Mummy and Daddy. I don’t want to do a sodding MBA and spend my life in conference calls. I want to sit in Kennedy Road in sight of a banyan tree writing dirty stuff.â€
It is not because I am lonely that I think there should be more of that. I sense that these little people should be left more to themselves and end up , like me, having difficulty remembering what IT stands for but earning a living in peace instead.
Middle class consumerism is consuming the Earth and $3 million debentures for schools are integral to the destruction. If we ever meet Mr Tsang’s 10 million target, there should be a larger number of additional skilled workers, artisans and artists who are happy to work just as much as they need to, walk away from it in the evening and have a limit on the number of Audis and dining tables of Borneo teak that they want.
There are just so many LL.Bs and MBAs that a dying world can cope with.
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