Remember....the civics lesson we learnt

These past few weeks, i read with interest some of the news items in the papers and this kept me wondering what has happened to the moral values that we had learned. It looks as if society is now moving towards a situation where moral values do not exist at all. We are going backwards to an age where only the laws of the jungle is in force. Survival of the foetus is the only law we know.
Children nowadays are not taught about showing respect to the elderly. They are not taught to be polite, to be well mannered, to care for others and to be humble. For example, during a buffet lunch or dinner, they are not taught to take enough food for themselves and to leave food for others who are at the back of queue. When every one has taken their share, then they can go for a second round. Instead, one can see the children just pick the food they like best and piled onto their plates as high as a mountain. If they can't finish the food, they just dumped it into the bin. What a wastage of good food and the people at the back of the queue has none. The second observation is that children are not well disciplined. They are left to do as they like. The parents don't seem to teach their children what is right from what is wrong. So when something terrible happens, they begin to ask questions....but then, it will be too late.
I always wondered why as a nation progresses, there are so many social problems. Then i realized parents are very hardworking indeed to earn as much money as possible. As a result, they spend very little time with their children. Consequently, the children are not taught properly or disciplined. The cycle goes on and on until today this is the result we see. I'm truly fearful for our future generations...........if we don't act now.

Remember....

Today is the first Saturday in September. How time flies! As i was watching Hurricane Earl on TV, i remembered the storm we experienced in Teluk Intan on Monday. Almost the same time every year, around the end of August or the beginning of September, we sure would experience some form of this type of tropical storm. Well, it was not like a hurricane but the winds were strong enough to cause some forms of damage. Many roofs of houses were being blown off, trees were down. This time around, the winds were strong enough to shift the tiles of my house and water was dripping profusely down from the ceiling. Fortunately, it was confined to one room only. The telephone line in my house was down too. For two days, i could not make any calls nor receive calls. Also, this time around, some parts of town had hail stones too. What a storm....it came suddenly, caused damages to some houses and we were left assessing the destruction. For those people whose roofs were blown off, would have spent quite a bit to replace them. Anyway, storms of such destructive nature were unheard of while i was young then. It was only in the last decade or so we experienced such severe storms. I wonder if this is the consequence of us cutting down forests to make way for housing projects to cause this form of climate change. Also, for the past few years, big trees of more than a hundred years old were being cut down because they were too old. I remembered while i was still teaching then, a new principal would come with ideas of planting lots of trees around the school compound. We teachers would be so happy because it would not be so hot around the school and we had some shade for our cars. After 7 or 8 years when another principal came, he would start cutting down all those trees because he had other ideas. I remembered very vividly the day i went back to school after the long holidays, how bright the whole school compound was, then i realized why....the trees were all gone.