"The daily fare we get from the news plainly speaks the decay, if not absence, of moral values. Instead of finding statesmen in what used to be the august chambers of Congress, we now find thieves who have been plundering taxpayers’ money, otherwise known as Priority Development Assistance Fund, through ghost projects. Billions of pesos worth of taxpayers’ money have been finding their way into the pockets of legislators, for decades now, we are told. Next, we find more entrenched thieves who have been stealing people’s money with impunity in the Bureau of Customs, with powerful people in government backing them up. We are confronted by corruption in nearly every transaction we make with all the branches of government. But corruption and deceit exists too in private businesses. Take the case of the water concessionaires delivering water service in Metro Manila, Maynilad and Manila Water Service Co. They have recently been exposed for passing on their income taxes to the consumers, contrary to morals and public policy. What is sickening about society is the way we accord respect to people who have wealth, without regard to where their wealth originated and how they acquired it. Where have all the honest people gone? What has happened to the moral values we used to be taught by our parents and teachers? I used to think that decay in moral values was an exclusive domain of the calloused and shameless men who choose to hold a public office as an opportunity for enrichment and thievery. Yet, on at least two occasions I was shocked to see young people exhibiting signs of wrong values. In a recognition ceremony for the bar passers of San Beda Law School, one young man who passed the 2012 bar examination said that he took up law because once, when he visited a classmate at his house, he was awed at how big and lavishly-appointed his classmate’s house was. When he asked his friend what his father did for a living, the classmate answered: “My dad is a tax lawyer.” The new lawyer said that was the day he vowed he would one day become a tax lawyer himself. Recently, I found an opportunity to have a sense of the kind of moral values first year students of law have. When I read a compelling article by Adelle Chua, the opinion editor of Standard Today, titled Indifference and Hypocrisy, I reproduced copies of it and asked my Legal Writing class students to write a reflection paper on the message of the article. Ms. Chua’s article centered on the experience of a De La Salle University student who saw a pedicab driver lay slumped, and later pronounced dead, on the pedestrian pavement on Taft Avenue near the gates of the school. Students, and perhaps, faculty members, too, passed the man by without so much as taking a look if he was still alive or not. The student asked for help from the school’s security guards but got no responses. The boy was profoundly disgusted and disillusioned at the indifference and hypocrisy of people who were supposed to live Christian values. Before asking my students to write a reflection paper on the article by Ms. Chua on the subject of indifference and hypocrisy, I made a point of prefacing the task by telling them that they are in law school not just to study law but, to one day, become lawyers with a soul and a heart for people and society. I narrated to them the case of a lawyer from San Beda who landed seventh in the bar examinations but who used his legal knowledge and skill to deceive his clients, a mother and a daughter, and succeeded in selling all their properties. Then he kept for himself the proceeds of all the sale, leaving the mother and daughter poor and penniless. That lawyer was eventually disbarred and went down in shame, I told them. When I was reading their reflection papers, I felt I was being doused by cold water. More than half of the class expressed no compassion. Many of them saw nothing wrong with the people who did nothing near De La Salle College to help the man who may have been dying or was already dead. Some said that if they were in that situation, they would probably not have done anything either. Many said, “The man may just have been sleeping so why bother”? One said, “What if it was a mere trap and when I try to help, the man’s cohorts will swoop down on me?” Many of them said: “Even if I wanted to help, I could not have done anything anyway.” Quite a number said “I understand why no one helped. We are all busy with many different things to do. Maybe the students who ignored the dying or dead man had a class to attend.” These answers appalled and frightened me. This is the generation who will be the leaders of this country soon. What are parents teaching them? What has society done to them? Are families so focused on building material wealth that moral values are now forgotten? Families are where values should begin to form. The burden starts with parents. Next, the teachers in the primary and secondary levels. Then, the people in government who must be models of good moral values. The revamp in values must happen in each of us now, before it is too late."
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 01:23:24 +0000