Malaysian Teenagers Going Down in the Street

They’re gonna clean up your looks,
With all the lies and the books
To make a citizen out of you.
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on your son
So they can watch all the things you do.

Although this is one of my favorite songs (or maybe because of it), I rather not speculate what the things that was going through the head of that song’s writer. I have trouble going through the things in my own head already. But it is a nice song and it helps for someone like me to zone out without getting to the drugs. Cheers to My Chemical Romance.

But hey, the subject of the song fits. Teenagers are scary, whether the adults want to admit it or not. But they won’t admit it because obviously as mature adults, each holds a sense of vanity that they might be somebody’s role model someday, whether the teens want to or not, and it’s low-class-lah to walk around blurting, “Oh yeah, teenagers. Nasty, filthy animals.”

Nasty and filthy. Like the streets of KL where they’ve taken to loitering. And according to the Star newspaper reports, they might even be filthy rich. But don’t too easily brand these as spawns of the ignorant, fat-wallet’d parents. Money comes from a grapevine of multi-layers exchanges, considering the reports of theft and the occasional tai kor or ‘big brother’ as whacamacallit.

Starting with the theft and the intimidation, of course the local restaurant owners along those streets would say it, either exaggeration or plain truth. Remember the rule of real estate? Location, location, location and it is devaluing power of location to have punk-haired teenagers smoking right outside their non-smoking sections.

Sure you can have the local Rakan Tetangga patrols (it’s something like a group of caffeine-empowered neighbourhood watchmen) making rounds. But for the sake of smart-ass mentality, nightwatch patrolling is like running through a flock of pigeons outside a Sri Paandi restaurant. The watchmen can walk through those streets many times over but the teenagers just flutter back to the streets the minute those backs are turned.

And these teenagers are a klik. They have cellphones, with service lines rates cheaper than rap stars’ name, so it’s no difficulty to coo-coo a warning when the fellows-in-uniform turn the corner. And those same said cellphones is used to herd in the money-hungry teenagers when the ‘big brother’ comes to their streets (as if the street belonged to them already).

One can only speculate what the tai kor wants in a street full of teenagers, more so since some of these teenagers hang out near parking lots. If you need another reason to bring a big, heavy umbrella after parking your car, open-air, on a Malaysian sunny day, this takes the cake as they might take your everything-else. Like I mentioned, there are other ways to finance those punk hairdos and designer bags than negligent parents. Rich or poor parents doesn’t matter; it’s the negligence.

This situation is worrying. Screw aside the ‘children are our future’, and ‘keep the city image clean’ slogans (since our Parliament is spouting those words almost every week) because when the tai kor comes, things get criminal. Think gang recruitment and I’m not joking s**t here. I don’t have to be a police officer or a news reporter to put two and two makes four. And I used to walk on some of those streets and know folks who still walk on those streets.

These aren’t bored teenager. They’re perverted teenagers. Next to being perverted means already being bored (which makes bored and perverted teenagers an over-use of adjectives), the possibilities of the kids' greater entry to criminal exposure and manipulations are so numerous, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a shark-grinning tai kor in the face.

If you want to get them teen creeps out of trouble, you got to play the same game as them ‘big brothers’ do. Because sure as the teenagers got soup for brains, these tai kor don’t wear law enforcement uniforms and they swing money bags instead of batons. Once the right kind of good guys put on these costumes, be nice with the teenagers. Hang money on a fish pole and herd them to a different direction as they follow hungrily. When you netted their respect, make them do community work for money.

Like pick up the street trash, maybe even sort by recyclables. Give money. Get them to paint the city’s iron fences. Give money. Encourage them to join the Rakan Tetangga and help make streets safer. Give money. Make them vomit the information about these dirty tai kor. Give money. Money, money, money; the root of all persuasion.

It’s not cheap (duh, they are rich kids!) but let’s scream out the music here. The reality remains that you can’t get kids off the streets, not as long as there are inattentive parents, nice streets and perverted teenagers. Hell, you might as well not have bothered. Let these kids do their syok-time, get on floating high and slur profanities at everybody in a skirt. Yeah, that how we want the tourists to remember Visit Malaysia Year 2007.

If the country ever got to something like that, doing nothing about the teenagers, then we know we’re truly running out of smart people. So at the very least to get something done for the sake of getting something done about it, very least for the overworked G-Men can do is to try to divert their attention away from the even more bad guys.

Because as school holidays are still going on, this country doesn’t need to keep digging its own 50 year old grave without its teenagers playing a High School Musicale version of My Chemical Romance.

Teenagers scare the living s***t out of me,
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes
Or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me!