our apathy forced them to….

i was alerted to this site/picture by reader sweetspirit who made a comment on my blog ‘obituary of someone else’.

when i first saw the photo, i kind of go… “yeech! gross!”. but then later on, it gave me a rude shock. gosh! to think what people would go through to invoke sympathy. but no… it’s not that i haven’t heard of this sort of thing happening before. i did. lots of time. like the breaking of leg, i heard it happening in thailand a lot. and in india, heard stories of some people throwing their babies in front of passing car (usually tourists) to demand money from them for causing injury to their babies!!

in the write-up of shane arnfield, he mentioned ‘poor people’ but i feel it’s not fair to single out poor people. sometimes these people had been mutiliated not of their own free will but by someone else in a syndicate. a syndicate where they kidnapped people and mutiliated them and forced them to beg… and of course the syndicate get the money. i know there’s lots of talk on this kind of syndicate operating in thailand but as for our own country, malaysia, i’m not sure.

i personally know of a friend’s friend whose son was kidnapped and they later found him begging in thailand…. with a broken leg. sad but true.

let’s look at the part where it is really the poor themselves (the individuals) who mutiliate themselves to obtain sympathy. why do you think they need to resort to that? i know… they want to invoke our sympathy… so what i should mean to ask is – do they really have to do that? are they doing it because our hearts had become hardened to the plight of the poor? the apathy we show to the poor caused them to do such drastic act to gain our sympathy?