The Basics of Respect (As Easy as 1, 2, 3)

We now live in a world where boundaries seem to be the size of a needle; where lines are crossed without warnings and privacy is just an invisible coating of our lives. One day, we would wake up naked – – stripped by the armors of extreme gossiping and owned by everyone’s selfish desire. Short to say, we are a public property.

Most of the time, we tend to be oblivious of one of the first few values that we learned from home, that is respect, which, if we try to ponder on, is one of the easiest to practice. When we were children, as Filipinos, we were taught how to say the words “po” and “opo”, “ate” and “kuya”, the practice of “pagmamano” and allowing adults to talk by themselves. More than those, we were also taught how to set boundaries among people and which words should and should not be spoken in public. We were taught to accept personal differences – that some people were born the way were – because we had to respect God’s creations. Respect was like our pen and paper – we didn’t go to school without it.

However, in this time and age, where social media eat more than half of our lives, we can’t help but do things that oppose our values and characters as people. We say things that we know we should not but we have to anyway. We do things that necessitate us to cross paths with other people, even to the point of creating scars within their hearts. WE SPREAD RUMORS LIKE WILDFIRE, WITH NO DIRECT INTENTION TO DISRESPECT, BUT BECAUSE WE WANT TO BE POPULAR. We have to just because we have to.  

But come to think of it.

We are creating a world where words are unsafe and actions create pain. We want to be teachers of values and character, but the simplest of virtues are the ones we leave unnoticed. We are building generations of liars, of thieves and of criminals. And as much as we want to create peace, we can’t – because we, ourselves, are troublemakers.

Come to think of it.

If we want to cultivate a fruitful life, then we should go back to the basics of our values; those that give importance to the essence of what humanity should really mean; those that should bring about positive change; and those that could create a substantial future.

One thing – respect.