Selective Dementia

srizals@gmail.com

Memory can be a bliss. Growing up and growing old is a norm of the human being. Like death, nobody can dodge it, no matter who he thinks he is, no matter how much money if not love, he has. No one, even you yourself can buy your way out of it.

For some it would be a nightmare, for the selected few, getting old is like a Chengal tree, the older it gets, the stronger and harder it become, and worth priceless. Do you know that you can see the oldest and the largest Chengal tree in South East Asia right here in the lands of the Malay, well to be more precise, in the land of the turtles, Terengganu Darul Iman, somewhere in Dungun, which got its name from a unique flower. 20 to 30 years ago, its beaches were swarmed with the largest turtle of them all. The giant leatherback turtles. Some still come, but the eggs were not fertile since there are no more males around. Sad but true. Other turtles are dwindling too. Thanks to the eater of everything he can get his hands on and the people that make profits out of other's miseries, in this case, the turtles that end up as a trophies or fancy souvenirs. Don't blame the Malays, we are Muslims, so we aren't allowed to eat them, only the eggs. Hmm, maybe we do play some part of it, we never know. So stop eating them. According to a recent study, consuming a certain amount of turtle eggs can be bad for you. So let's play safe and smart. Don't take unnecessary risks. It's not worth it. But the good and the brave are fighting back. Sanctuaries at selected beaches are running and enforcement, if not perfected, is taking its course. I only wished that their presence is felt by the bad and the deaf. Maybe we can learn something from the chameleon.

Do you know that the price of wood is sky rocketing here in the lands of the Malay. Illegal loggers seemed unstoppable, like the snatch thieves, they usually got lucky and got away with millions of ringgit, as if the logs could be easily tuck in and hidden from the naked eyes and the sawmills that would receive them were as elusive as the small Bengal cats that once roamed the forest of Malaysia in abundance. Come to think of it, even the common pangolin around my area seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Previously, they were so abundant, that in certain months of the year, I can't reveal it for safety reason, many were killed with their babies still clinging on their tails. Have the unchecked speed demons finally achieved something at last? The extinction of the slow moving Malayan pangolin! During the good old days, I even found a dead Malayan tiger cub by the roadside. My feelings at that time were like a kid that finally got to see the dinosaurs with a mixture of sadness and being afraid at the same time of seeing the bleeding and torn little cub, anxiously looking around if its mother could still be somewhere near. It’s funny how I could still remember it, like it had just happened yesterday.

Memory is golden. Sometimes it is all that is left. It is priceless. But for some, they can't cling on to it too tightly in case it would reveal just how wrong and bad they really are. No one seemed remember Dier Yassin or the Balfour Declaration or Lawrence of Arabia. Instead of learning from their mistakes and remedy them, they have chosen a different and a strange path. They have joined the club of the ones who suffer selective dementia. Hopefully this kind of amnesia won't drag on into their golden age. It would be sad to cry every now and then when you realised for the hundredth time that your loved ones had passed away only to forgot about it in the very next morning. Sad but true.

Having said this, it is accepted that this special gift is needed for us in order to survive a near driven to madness experience such as being abused or victimised by a monster. Even the monster himself, needs selective dementia too, in order to carry on being a monster and stop his own hand from pulling the trigger and blow his own head off, on discovering what a monster he truly is actually. For the mandevil, expect no remorse. He would cling on to his tyranny like trophies. He is the dweller of the everlasting fire, forever. And unlike Sam in the Supernatural, he won't get any share of torturing, ever.

Even if he had been killing, plundering and destroying for a hundred years, being in the damnation of hell for eternity would suffice for all his sins. For a unislamic Muslim that chose the similar path, a couple billions of years would cleanse all his sins before he is permitted to enter paradise for having a tiny faith deep inside his heart in Allah. But to put things in perspective, try clinging on to a burning match stick with your fingers. If you could hold on to it until the fire is gone then you should not have any fear of entering the eternal burning fire of hell.