Respect: What this generation lacks?

Respect is an act of showing a feeling of admiration for a person due to his or her desirable character. Respect can be shown in different ways. It can be shown by way of gesture, or verbally, any way you feel can pass on the vibe that you admire a person’s character. Respect is without colour, gender, ethnicity, status, or overall background. It is simply a feeling of admiration.

In many cultures around the world, respect is a norm, it is either engraved in our hearts when we are young or we just learn to do so. It is important in life to have respect for others and also reciprocate the respect others give us because as the saying goes, respect is reciprocal. Being able to have respect for people and then reciprocate it to others is an extremely important virtue that we all need to inculcate. Respect for others doesn’t just mean greeting them in the morning, it also encompasses areas like how we treat people daily. Primarily, the person you respect has to have a particular trait you revere, for example, I have huge respect for my Dad because besides just being the man who fathered me, he is also very impactful in our immediate society. Such characters can make you respect a person.

However, in present-day society, respect seems to be in short supply. It’s not uncommon to find children getting into frequent arguments with their parents and elders and truly it isn’t encouraging to know this. This indicates that the generation of today lacks a valuable skill that has been treasured for generations. The art of respect is needed in many criteria of life; when applying for a job, when making general day to day conversations, the list is never-ending. Being able to persuade our next generation of leaders to have respect is far from easy. However, we have to make the effort to let our young know that respect is an extremely essential virtue in the bigger world whether they like it or not. Even in the area of our traditional cultures, young people need to understand that they are extremely relevant. Many will concur with the fact that young people seem to have no care whatsoever to the traditions of their native people. Being able to know my roots is a privilege to me, the fact that many youngsters find it easy to neglect many important and aged cultures is repulsive to me and shows the degree to which the children of this generation lack respect. Nonetheless, parents must make an effort to make their children understand their cultural heritage.

Besides just people around us receiving respect, many celebrities receive more respect than they should receive. Certainly, we must recognize their various talents but then it is more important to focus on people around us. The amount of admiration, love, and respect they are given seems to be nothing short of being absurd. This sort of attention does boost morale but it makes the individual (celebrity) have a false sense of control over people and it makes them feel like they are demi-gods. We shouldn’t make them have this false ideology and so we shouldn’t give out so much respect. Respect truly is reciprocal and if we can’t receive the respect that we give them then what’s the use of giving them so much admiration?