We’ve lost it along the way

I was shopping with my niece and nephews today at a bookstore / gift store and I was so taken aback by some of the items they had there. They had key rings, gift cards and those little signs that you hang on doors or walls such as “danger keep out of my room”. But amongst these “child-friendly” items they had ones that were extremely lewd and open. One of the signs even had cartoon pictures of a bunch of naked women on it! My sister and I were so disgusted we had to quickly (and subtly) move my nephews away from there so that they didn’t see it. In fact there were a lot of items that I would say belongs in an adult store instead of a general book/gift store.

Now I know that some people will call me a prude or whatever and probably tell me to ‘’get with the times“, but honestly how can we expose people to such lewdness, and don’t we consider how this corrupts the minds of innocent children. Surely these types of things should be kept for those people who don’t mind seeing it, instead of flaunting it openly for the general public to see. I may be a prude, boring, old-fashioned even but really, where have our morals and ethics gone?

This morning as I was helping my brother with a Media Studies assignment I read that in the 1950s the South African government opposed the introduction of television in this country on moral and ethical grounds, and I thought, ‘Ah, so there was a time when morals and ethics was common amongst people’. Sadly those times seem to be way gone!

Yes, it seems our actual “progression” in life is actually a huge “regression” because we seem to have lost the things that really matter, slowly along the way our ethics and morals began to lessen as we gave way to modernity, globalisation and capitalism. In our quest to “get with the times” we’ve actually lost more than what we’ve gained. And so it is that we have young children behaving like adults and crazy things happening all the time. A recent newspaper headline read that 45 000 schoolgirls get pregnant a year in South Africa! Am I the only person who thinks this is crazy? Surely something isn’t going very right here!

So at the risk of sounding extremely old-fashioned, I just need to say that I want the morality that we’ve lost, I want us to find our ethics, I want to be able to walk in to a store and not feel the need to cover up the eyes of young innocent children. I want to shout this out to whoever’s listening, I want people to start understanding that a society without morals, values and ethics is a lost society, a society that will forever be plagued with social problems. I’m not saying that morals and ethics solves all the problems in society, but it sure does make a huge difference! Where are the days when everyone understood this- When all people believed that respect and modesty is essential? We’ve lost those days, we’ve lost those people and all we’ve gained is a world of materialism where the outside looks good and modern but the inside is decaying, like a rotten core in a shiny apple.

May the Almighty Allah guide us all and help us to find the goodness that we have lost!

Image from here