Andrew Miller: Why the three wise monkeys set a bad example

There is a children’s outdoor water playground near Marina Bay in Singapore.

Kids run through a gauntlet of fancy sprinklers set into a recycled rubber surface the size of a netball court while parents rest their weary legs, ponder the water quality, and wonder whether it is too soon for another coffee.

After the hundredth “watch me, Dad,” the little one settled into a tentative game of chasey with other kids, and I drifted into remembrance.

My sisters and I were running through the spray on a hot 1970s suburban evening. The twirling jets of cool water spraying the buffalo grass came from a spinning metal sprinkler at the end of a sun-faded green hose. There are no kookaburras in the steel emoji trees of Marina Bay, but I could hear their larrikin laughter — the soundtrack of an even more ancient continent.

The petrichor rising from our steaming driveway swelled in my nose.

“We were happy then” is the laziest of lies, but even after Dad turned the tap off and we lay in sweat under a buzzing bedside fan, I really think we were. Life seemed no more complicated than doing something fun until an adult stepped in to stop it. There were adults back then.

Eventually I noticed I was not the only vigil at the water playground. Nestled in the fringe of the overhanging, cartoon-green trees were three Buddha-plump stone monkeys, each one about the size of a refrigerator.

The first, as you may have guessed, was covering their eyes, the second their ears, and the third their mouth.

Communication influencers tell us to formulate our points into groups of three for better comprehension, but I’ve never understood the meaning of the three wise monkeys.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Some say the ancient macaques of Japanese Shinto and Taoist traditions display the qualities of refined people who mind their own business when it comes to sin and gossip.

Another view, more appealing to humanitarian advocates, is that the monkeys set no good example. By refusing to acknowledge the truth, they become complicit in wrongdoing.

The hardest part of being an adult is understanding when it is time to stop minding your own business. To watch the news, hear the news and refuse to ignore the news.

Palestinian, Israeli, Ukrainian and Russian children would immediately run and play in the water together with my daughter if they could. You know that is true.

Children have no serious issues with one another until they grow up being fed a version of history and their place in it.

Even without a common tongue, they know how to play together.

Some of us would prefer to play our way to the grave — to perpetually ignore terrible events in the world because they are not apparent to us.

“I don’t care who started it, I’ll finish it,” Dad would say. Where is he now?

There are no adults any more. We have to settle our own squabbles over petty possessions and who was here first.

Children don’t say much, but they know what evil looks and sounds like. They know that starvation, the making of orphans and the high-tech killing of other children are wrong.

To make war is always a failure in this age of communication. Palestinian and Israeli children deserve better than whatever level of hell is being perpetuated there by adults with power.

The fact that we don’t have much say in it means we should be louder, not quieter. Politicians are scared of only one thing: our opinions.

The monkeys make more sense to me now. It’s good for kids to play in blissful ignorance, but adults must accept the responsibility that comes with knowledge of the dark aspects of the world.

The missing fourth monkey says, “Do no evil.”

If the “solution” includes hurting children, then adults must step in and stop it.