Have heart but no reach!

(Baonghean) - In recent days, public opinion has been buzzing with discussion, mainly "throwing stones" at a proposal by a "female congresswoman" at the ongoing National Assembly session. That is, at the discussion session on the draft law on civil status, a female representative of the people proposed a regulation requiring a "purely Vietnamese" name when registering a child's birth.

The reason she made such a suggestion is because in society there is a phenomenon of some “parents” who like to name their children after characters in Korean movies like “Dinh San U”, or after phone brands like “Cao Nokia”… which is not in accordance with the traditional customs of Vietnamese people. There are also cases of giving bad names, names that are not aesthetically pleasing, causing inferiority complex or names that are too long and complicated to use, such as the case of the name “Le Hoang Hieu Nghia De Nhat Thuong Tam Nhan”… Therefore, according to this “representative”, it is necessary to include in the law provisions on naming principles, principles of determining surnames, determining ethnicity to be consistent with long-standing customs and traditions.

A somewhat useful suggestion, but it was strongly reacted to by public opinion in a negative direction. Why is that? Thinking back, it is not unreasonable that people reacted like that. First of all, technically, naming purely Vietnamese is very difficult because looking at life broadly, almost all of our people's naming methods from ancient times to the present use Sino-Vietnamese words to convey, send a message, a certain wish of the parents. Like Hung Vy is to wish that their child will be strong, healthy and have a brilliant career. Even though, in reality, the guy with that name is sometimes short, ugly and not exceptionally talented. Girls are named Diep with the meaning of being slender, soft and lovely like a green leaf. Or Thanh means green, pure... Due to the influence of Chinese characters for thousands of years, most of our people's names are Sino-Vietnamese, so forcing people to name their children in a purely Vietnamese way is very difficult and impossible. On the other hand, naming children is a citizen's freedom as stated in the Constitution. And the phenomenon of naming children after Korean movies or phone brands is not common, but only occurs in small areas in some villages and hamlets in mountainous areas, in some families. That means it is not capable of threatening the survival of Vietnamese culture. So there is no need to raise the issue in such a big way. Moreover, this is probably the main reason why the proposal was "defeated" so badly that naming children is an extremely small matter in life; Meanwhile, there are countless pressing, urgent issues that are practically related to people's lives and the country's development direction that need delegates to spend time discussing thoroughly in order to find solutions... People elect their representatives and pay taxes to serve the activities of the representatives, expecting to have important issues answered and difficult, intractable problems in their lives resolved, not to have them handle a few trivial, small matters like that.

And doing so would be like “killing a chicken with a butcher knife” which is very wasteful, very unworthy and not worthy. Therefore, we can conclude that the proposal of the National Assembly delegate is: Has heart but not vision.

Artisan