Indulged in Moral Illiteracy

Not quite so, many would believe. But on the contrary, quite so, I have my strong convictions. It is not very hard to pin point, where exactly things went wrong, a few decades ago, that today, we have almost lost our peace of mind, well to be exact, we have lost peace in the region. What is hard, is to overcome our insecurities regarding anything and everything. I do not have the nerve to utter a word against my boss for the fear of losing my job. I do not feel comfortable acknowledging the mistakes my close family members make. I fear censure from the other family members. I do not like to accept a mistake that I have made. I know I will be rebuked, and that one mistake, will be used as a reason to chastise, devalue and demean me in all the future steps that I take. This is a general mindset that we harbour here. We try to thrive at the expense of undermining our peers. We cling to the worldly assets of a job, validation and ‘honour’ to the extent that we actually dishonour ourselves. We degrade our own being, by accepting the ‘don’ts’ as ‘do’s’. We deprive ourselves of self respect, once we decide to choose the petty over, the more priced values.
Today, we raise hue and cry when little Basma loses her life to protocol. How many of us do not prefer to be given superiority over the rest, when in a queue? How many of us, who can afford ‘fast track’ will not pay more than the doubled amount to NADRA, for the same that could be done at a lesser payment, but after waiting in the queues for almost a day? How many of us do not welcome, the privileges that we enjoy belonging to any institution, and that at times are not very fair, when it comes to people in general?
We have become totally devoid of morals and values, because our feeble, capitalistic minds cannot reason out the importance of something that is not paying back instantly. The westerners have adopted the ethics and morals (although the definition of it remains a relative factor) on the basis of learning and evidence based researches. We denounce all the characteristics of honesty and sincerity, because we inherited those in the form of Divine revelations. We do not smile and greet each other pleasantly , because our faith recommends so , and at the back of our mind, faith is a concept of the old. The religion is history, because it has no scientific basis, to us. What we tend to overlook here is the fact that we are not a nation of scientists, doctors, engineers and space explorers, living in a perfect world of laboratories, hospitals, refineries, or space stations. We cannot comprehend the right from wrong, when we are surrounded by a sub-continental culture that is striving to keep alive, enmeshed within the distorted teachings of religion, whether the religion be Islam, Hinduism, Christianity or Ahmedi, in this region of ours.
The moral illiteracy that surrounds us, is dominating our minds to the extent, we cannot actually fathom our true location in this puddle. In order to understand, the first step remains TOLERANCE. We are at such tangents to each other on the basis of class, manners, ethics, ethnicity, clans, tribes and language that we do not give each other space enough to breathe. As a result, anarchy, chaos and unrest ensue. There are steps we should take to break free from the shackles of moral illiteracy. We will talk about those, next time. Till than the food for thought is , “Understand that we are morally illiterate, in a lot of ways, and this could be improved.”