Urgent need for moral values
WHEN human values erode, the results are often easy to see.
According to the International Association for Human Values, there are a few key principles upon which societies and cultures around the world have been established. They are also fundamental to religions, humanism and other belief systems.
These include respect, tolerance, generosity, caring for others and the planet, peace, dignity, integrity and love.
Yet when one regularly hears or reads of stories of despair, abuse, neglect, skulduggery and extreme breaches of marital vows, one has to wonder where we are going wrong as a society – or even as a community.
The situation is made worse when it hits closer to home, where the very people we should be looking out for – our children, spouses, parents and grandparents – are on the receiving end of emotional and even physical abuse. As part of Older Persons Week which runs until tomorrow (Thursday), POST has highlighted on this page and elsewhere the shocking plight of the elderly.
As the director of the Verulam Day Care and Frail Care Centre, Pravin Patak, asked: “Can you believe that we as a society comment on our spiritual beliefs, but perform such acts against the very same parents that brought us into the world?”
Patak said he had seen senior citizens being hoodwinked by their children to part with their properties, savings and even old-age grants. Worse still, some were physical abused. “They come with scars on their bodies. Some are left outside our facility with nothing but the clothes on their backs.”
The aged, he says, need love, care and kindness not only from their families but from society – and that if society does not care, it leads to the moral degeneration of communities. Many of the problems plaguing society today, even crime and corruption to an extent, can be addressed over the long term by instilling human values.
This starts at home with what we teach our children and what we expose them to. Parents must do more to guide children, and lead by example.
Teachers, too, hold immense power in the shaping of young minds, so that children grow up with a better understanding of, and appreciation for, the people and things around us.