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Sir,

With the entire world watching, even the wind seemed as though it had stopped blowing, she took the podium and belted one of her heart-warming poems, which was titled ‘The hill we climb’. The opening line touched the cockles of the heart; respect has come into a juddering halt.

“When days come, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” said Amanda Gorman, an American poetess during the inauguration of Joe Biden, the American President, in Washington. Lack of respect is a ‘never-ending shade’ that has engulfed a lot of people in the kingdom.

Like swooning leaves in a raging tempest, I develop interminable heart blisters when people lack respect. Respect has taken a repugnant turn in our societies nowadays. Not only do people want to be respected, but they also become opinionated by judging an act as disrespectful. First, we must remove the beam in our own eyes, and then we will see clearly to remove the speck out of our brother’s eyes. It is a multiplied and repeated shame to hear adults hurling insults concentrated in offensive language; worse, using malicious and X-rated words in broad daylight. People are no longer intuitive and argumentative enough to separate chuff from wheat. What is the young generation picking from this; that it is acceptable to use your mouth disrespectfully? This is totally wrong!

This dastardly act is executed right before the young and promising little ones of the country. The perpetrators forget that children are highly capacitated in grasping every single word uttered to them. Hence, some people become too adept in forgetting that first they are parents to their children but as they grow, their children become their parents. A ferocious self-introspection needs to be done! Finally, without feelings of respect, what there to distinguish men from beasts, we are standing on hot coal because of this superfluous spirit of disrespect. In short; it’s really unnecessary.

Wakhe Simelane