It’s impossible not to listen to the growing chorus of teachers lamenting how today’s schoolchildren are increasingly unruly, defiant, and, dare I say it, devoid of basic courtesy. The old standards of respect and discipline seem to have crumbled into dust, replaced by a brazen disregard for authority. We can either dismiss these concerns as the grumblings of an older generation clinging to the past, or we can take a serious, unflinching look at why things have spiraled out of control—and decide what must be done about it.

To begin with, let’s not romanticize the past too much. Children have never been perfect angels, even in those so-called “golden days” of discipline. But one can’t deny that something fundamental has changed. Where once the mere presence in the classroom of a teacher commanded respect, today that same teacher fights an uphill battle against a room full of miniature tyrants armed with smartphones, rude retorts, and an overblown sense of self-importance. Parents and teachers used to seem like partners in the same venture: the business of building good citizens. Now, a single call from an offended parent could reduce a teacher’s authority to shreds. It’s a toxic mix of entitlement and misplaced priorities, and the children have learned to exploit it with frightening precision.

Technology, of course, looms large in this narrative. The digital playground, where everyone is a performer and likes, shares, and comments determine your worth, has redefined what it means to be a child. Values such as humility, patience, and self-control are drowned out by the constant din of instant gratification. Screen addiction, combined with parents who themselves are stuck to their own devices, has brought forth a generation deprived of meaningful human interaction. The irony is cruel: the more connected we’ve become, the more disconnected we are from the things that truly matter, such as decency and kindness.

But then, of course, there’s the question of who or what is raising these children. Many parents, swamped by economic pressures and lured by modern distractions, have unwittingly delegated their roles to gadgets and media. After all, gadgets don’t teach accountability or respect. Media giants don’t care whether your child learns to say “please” or “thank you.” Instead, they churn out a line of fare that often glamorizes rebellion, sarcasm, and selfishness. When children ingest this day in and day out, it forms their worldview. Suddenly, authority figures become jokes, and being “cool” means being the loudest and most obnoxious voice in the room.

We also have a societal framework that no longer rewards virtues but celebrates audacity. Look at how some adults behave in public spaces, on social media, or even in positions of power. Rude is the new normal; arrogance is applauded. Why would kids think twice about yelling at a teacher when they see grown-ups belittling each other online or throwing tantrums in public? They are just a reflection of the world they are growing up in, a world that is fast losing its accountability and moral compass.

Of course, schools are far from blameless. Various institutions have grown so engrossed in test scores and rankings that character development takes a back seat. Curriculums on ethics, values, and good manners are invariably treated as peripheral fluff by the very type of foundational lesson they should represent. Without the firm underpinning of values education, classrooms will become battlefields, not sanctuaries, for learning.

Now to the glaring lack of boundaries in so many homes. Discipline has become a dirty word equated with cruelty or backwardness. But it is not. Discipline is teaching the child that their actions produce consequences. Without such guidance, kids grow up believing that the world owes them a favor—a sense of entitlement they take with them in their teachers, peers, and even strangers.

The solution is not a one-size-fits-all band-aid. Still, it does begin with small and deliberate steps: parents taking seriously their role of being the child’s first educators, schools tackling character building just as much as they do academics, and communities acknowledging that well-raised children reflect a collective and not individual responsibility. Most importantly, we must model what we want out of the young. After all, children pay more attention not to what is said but to what is done by us. If we want them to be better, we have to be better. And that is a challenge for all of us, not just the kids.

In the investigation being conducted by the house of representatives, some officials at the customs bureau had adopted procedures that facilitates the release of imported goods. Such procedure had been in place for a long time but was not known to the public except importers who avail of the process. It was only during the congressional investigation that the procedure was uncovered when some importers wailed over the unjust treatment.

It was revealed in the congressional investigation that what was supposed to be a fast process had resulted in the stalled goods notwithstanding the payment of huge grease money reaching millions of pesos. The issue was rooted on the alleged unfair treatment as other importers were gaining advantage as their goods are released with facility. The paid process would appear useless to those whose goods are not released as such delay would result to undue losses.

In the course of the investigation, officers of the customs bureau were keeping the truth that there is a system dubbed as “tara” in filipino jargon. It actually is an anomalous procedure that required importers to pay a huge amount, reportedly in the millions of pesos, just for their imported items to be released through what were labelled as fast lanes where imported goods could pass without questions.

Later, it would be uncovered that the fast lanes are color-coded depending on the amount of “tara” an importer could afford. The fastest among the lanes reportedly bypasses all check stations and the imported goods are released without question. The imported goods are released without the usual documents and physical inspection.

The huge amounts being paid under what was called the “tara” system do not go into the official collection of the government as the same are partaken by the corrupt women and men in the customs bureau. What came as the biggest revelation from the investigation is the allegation that the system is controlled by the city chief executive of Davao and his cohorts, chiefly the former president’s family. The collections are taken from the importers who are too willing to shell out huge amount just to ensure that their goods are released by the “tara” operators at the customs bureau.

What is revolting is the fact that poor taxpayers are easily penalized for non-payment of the correct taxes while those big businessmen could easily evade the payment of the taxes for their imported goods as long as grease money are paid to the corrupt officials running the “tara” system. Indeed, huge losses of collectible customs’ duties are being pocketed by some corrupt officials through the fast lanes.

comments to alellema@yahoo.com

THIS is actually meant for all of us, but especially for priests and consecrated persons who are supposed to lead the way for others to fulfill this duty. The ideal condition for us is to become more and more like Christ, having his mind and heart, having his spirit such that we can approximate our true identity and dignity as children of God just as Christ is the Son of God who became man to bring us back to where we should be.

And by intimacy, I mean that abiding awareness of Christ’s presence in our life, such that it affects even our feelings and passions. We need to set our whole selves to meet this condition because only with this intimacy with Christ can we be able to be also intimate with everybody else, which is the ideal condition in our relation with them.

It’s when we are intimate with Christ and with everybody else when we can really see ourselves in our rawest and unvarnished selves. Intimacy is where the most fundamental expressions of our humanity are made, where we become aware of our personhood, and where our real identity is established and defined.

We have to understand that we have to exert conscious effort to develop our proper sense of intimacy. We should not allow it to develop simply by chance or by some random initiatives. We have to be very serious about it, always coming up with concrete plans and strategies to put it in place and to keep it going.

And the reason for this is that especially today, with so many things grabbing our attention, we always have the tendency to treat God and others in a very casual way, if at all. And so, our relationships will most likely remain in the superficial level and are mainly driven by self-serving motivations and not by love, which is the proper spirit that should animate our relationships.

We have to do everything to grow in our intimacy with Christ everyday. This should be a constant concern of ours. This is the most ideal condition that we can and should be in, and we just have to figure out how it can be achieved.

To be sure, this is no pipe dream. This is not only possible and feasible. It is first of all Christ’s will and he has given us everything so that we can truly get intimate with him, and be privy to his will and ways.

Let’s remember that the world gives us a lot of options to do what we want to do. And though we are given an autonomy to do what we want, and all of them can be moral, valid and legitimate, we should try our best to choose the one that we are convinced is what Christ wants us to do in a given moment.

We have to make sure that Christ strikes us as a living person, and not just an idea, a memory, an abstract character to whom we go as a kind of psychological or emotional prop, or a spiritual ornament.

We need to see Christ in everything and everyone. Thus, we have to learn how to be recollected and to be a contemplative especially in the middle of the world as we go through our temporal affairs.

Let’s be sure that Christ is precisely also in the middle of the world, in our mundane affairs. He is waiting for us there and is expecting us to turn these things to him, since these things are the very test Christ provides us to see if we truly believe and love him or not.