Teacher... He Do Me...

I think all of us are familiar with that phrase... it starts of as a self-preservation phrase, to get justice for a piece of injustice inflicted on us. Growing up in a family with one sibling just one year behind me, both my bro and I had our fair share of playing 'tattler'. Some of us outgrow this habit, many don't.

From 'He Do Me'... it evolves to tattling to a higher authority. Many of us learn from a young age the power of tattling. From addressing righting a wrong, we also learn that it can put us in good favour; and it makes others look bad.... Many of us would rub our hands in secret glee and gloat over our rivals' downfall from grace. 

We are supposed to outgrow that, but, I think we don't. It takes a big (wo)man to be able to do that I realise. Personal ambitions usually stand in the way of achieving that level of magnanimity. As we grow older, many of us learn to feign our ways through a lot of situations. It's actually hard to tell the difference between 'tattling' and 'telling'. But very often if we sit down and analyse, we can tell them apart too. It all boils down to intent. And intent is very telling.... add that to action, you get confirmation.

Tattling is a sign of selfishness too. Tattling is always for the wrong reasons. Kids tattle to parents. Students tattle to their teachers. Teachers tattle to the principals. Instead of 'he do me'.... we move on to, 'he didn't do this, she didn't do that.' We tattle for reasons only known to us... but most of the time, the tattling is for a selfish reason. Tattlers are poor leaders. Instead of addressing the issue, instead of taking time out to address and communicate, we go all the way up... to the power we feel that can put a person into the bad pages of a book.

At work I see tattling too... much to my chagrin and amusement because as adults, we are supposed to put to kids' tattling. Yet adults are no different too. 

Anyway, that's just us... I could go on to another good friend of 'tattling' called 'beh-kam-buan' who has a good buddy called 'jiak-chor'. When those two friends go hand in hand, 'tattler' is kept very busy all the time. 

Well, mom had a good solution... both tattler and the tattled one... we used to kena sama-sama from her. We learned quite early on that it wasn't worth our effort to tattle. It's much better to kerja sama-sama and understand that we're in this all together. You get more out of yourself and everything around you. I think her approach shows wisdom.

Ah.. what got me riled? To realise that from among the adults, the supposedly more sensible people around me, they tattle like the small kid who runs yelling to his mummy.... 'He do me'.... These people, they should not be positions of leadership because they are not really interested to build the people around them. What they are interested feels like this... building little pedestals for themselves... only.