Respect: What Happened To It?

            When I was a child I was taught to respect others, especially adults. I was taught to listen to my parents and not talk back, obey my teachers, and tolerate the opinions of my peers. Now, being a typical kid, I didn’t always necessarily do these things, but I was taught them and I knew they were right. However, as I have gotten older, I see the children growing up around me and even people who are my age who seem to have never been taught about the concept of respect.  Even the respect I was taught as a child is weak compared to what my parents learned as kids.  Whether it is obeying your parents, being courteous to a teacher, or opening the car door for a lady, I see a serious lack of respect in our world today and it is not something that should go unnoticed.

            Kids nowadays are so rude. I cannot believe the number of children I see who show utter disrespect to their parents. Now, I’m not talking about temper tantrums (those are inevitable with the Terrible Twos). I mean when children are so greedy, when preteens somehow convince their parents to buy them a new nine hundred dollar smartphone because they smashed their old six hundred dollar one after reading some dramatic middle school text message. Kids who flat out say no right to their mom’s eyes when she asks them to clean their room. This is ridiculous; however, it’s not all the kids’ faults.

            Adults don’t show respect either. I have been on very few dates when a guy has actually opened the door for me.  It seems as if all people want these days is sex, so finding a clean person to date that will show respect for me, my standards, and God is hard to come by. And men aren’t the only ones wrong here. This is also the death of chivalry also goes for women, who have sadly lost respect for themselves and lost sight of their divine nature. People are only concerned about themselves these days, not about showing care for others. Parents may believe they’re showing love for their children by buying them anything they want, but really they are just raising a generation of greedy, self-centered robots.

            If you look around at any public place on any random day and time, you can see the loss of respect people have for others. And because people have become so obsessed with their personal appearance, this shows the lack of respect they have for their own divine nature and self-worth. It is sad to see a world of people so dependent on what others think of them, yet so proud as to reject the welfare of others.