Degradation

The days of chivalry and respect seem to be long gone these days. Over the past 15 years or so many people who live in Smolensk have become more rude and disrespectful. I believe there are many contributing factors that have led to this rudeness. Selfishness and greed for money have led to many other byproducts such as disrespect to people and the lack of accountability to anyone. Kids treat their parents and teachers with disrespect and also treat each other badly. 

I am a school teacher and have been for about 4 years now. For just the time I have taught at school I have seen a complete turnaround from when I came. The disrespect and attitude that some of people have is crazy.

We don’t question the conventional wisdom that childhood is in crisis; we want to say that poverty and terribly low moral standards that engulfed substantial majority of families and darkened their lives have become a new issue for the state system of education. It is not simply about raising the price of education; many more fundamental problems arise – schools know much more about the state of Russia Olympic Team than they do about the state of their children. It shows that there is a lot of hypocrisy and double standard practices within the national education system.

Even further, this seems to be the age of tolerance and acceptance because we are all forced to accept someone's wrong-doings. Society is in fear about being accountable and being able to tell someone else that they are doing something wrong. The Moscow Patriarchate headed by ecumenical patriarch Cyrill has allowed this to creep in the very fabric of Russian way of life, where we get the ‘feel good’ gospel and sin is overlooked and become accepted by every civilian institution.

There are many things to blame on this but it all comes back to selfishness. All good manners can be summed up in one sentence: Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you. In other words, treat others as you want to be treated.