Latest update September 24th, 2026 10:31 AM
Once there is life there is hope
In recent years, there have been spirited and conscientious efforts to revive moral standards, but one must wonder whether it is not too little, too late. Of greatest concern is the fact that the home for the greater part is not what it should be. Many parents seem to have surrendered control to their children, once these children attain the age of puberty.
Sometimes, the children do not even wait to attain the age of puberty when they begin to rebel and sadly enough, their parents allow them to. For one, the parents are not trained in parenthood, particularly those in the city who became parents at a very young age when peer pressure was such that every girl thought that the best way to prove to her friends that she was grown up was to have a baby.
Then there are the teachers who having been convinced that they deserve to be better paid, opt to do precious little. Indeed, there are the dedicated few, but even these often succumb to the pressure created by their colleagues.
To compound the issue, men appear to be reluctant to accept work in the public sector so that increasingly, the schools are staffed by women who are often not commanding enough to discipline some of the grown boys in the school. The absence of the men who could serve as role models, then, compounds the situation to the extent that discipline is lacking and soon indiscipline becomes the norm.
The complaints about bad office practices are numerous. These are the adults who left a school system where morals were not enforced. People coming from great distances are often left to wait while the office staff chats with a colleague or fiddles with something far removed from the job at hand.
The complaints have often fallen on deaf ears because even the administrator seems unable to act, for fear of either being made to feel guilty or simply because of ineptitude.
But this decline is not only evident in the schools and the offices. Just about every aspect of society has been permeated. The roads are no longer safe.
The old and infirm are often ignored by motorists, sometimes, as these less than agile people seek to use the few pedestrian crossings.
School children are at even greater risk. They are very mobile, active and people with relatively short attention spans. But this means nothing to motorists. At one time there was a rule that motorists exercise due care and attention in school zones. This is observed in the breach.
Indeed, there are a few who would halt, even if it means stopping the traffic behind them to allow children and the infirm to cross the roads. In the city, more and more one can see this happening.
And what has become of the salutations, particularly as one passes each other on the streets? There was a time when it was mandatory that the young salute the elders. Failing to do so often resulted in a chiding and most times, a beating from the elder or the parent. Not so today. Children are not even averse to using foul language in the presence of elders.
Disrespect knows no bounds these days and this trend is getting worse. We have seen people turning up late for interviews and assignments. Children are routinely late for school and these become late-coming adults.
The mode of dress of some job applicants also reflects the thinking in the minds of so many of today’s young. Slippers, jeans, unkempt and the like is what one sees.
To crown it, the very young people complain that they cannot get jobs. An old adage says that one never gets a second chance to make a first impression but then again, reading seems to be a dying art.
At this critical juncture, an attempt by anyone at a resurgence of moral standards should be commended, but one is left to wonder at the extent of the decline. The few exposed to the training programmes are often those who have no control except for their immediate work environment.
Then again, returning to the same morally unstable environment could see someone falling back into the old mode, thus rendering the training useless.
But as the saying goes, once there is life there is hope and one can only assume that this moral decline would be halted, although one must readily accept that it would take more, much more than a few training sessions to effect this change.
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