Crumbling Pillars.

I worked for three years as an administrator with an inner city charity, and subsequently had dealings with several city centre bars that helped fund the organisation. What shocked me wasn’t the issues the charity was set up to address, but the levels of corruption, bigotry, racism and crime collusion that were endemic in the council, the police and certain religious groups. It’s a world composed more of deals, decadence, deceit and discrimination than it is of decency.

Should it come as any surprise, then, that in recent years we’ve been seeing regular reports of council officials, policemen, religious leaders, and even teachers being suspended and often prosecuted for things ranging from assault to corruption to downloading child pornography? And it would be naïve, would it not, to imagine that those who get caught are the only ones doing it.

So what’s going on with these people we used to think of as the pillars of society? Are they becoming more inherently selfish, perverted, aggressive and corrupt, or is it just that more of them are being brought to book? I really don’t know, but maybe the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church offer a clue. And how widespread is the problem? I don’t know that, either.

What I do wonder is where children are supposed to look for their exemplars now. Their parents? I hardly think so. Parents aren’t available for their children as they used to be. They’re all working full time in order to be fully functional in our madly materialistic society. The kids are increasingly farmed out to day nurseries and early ‘education.’ And isn’t it a worrying fact that there have been several high profile cases in Britain of day nurseries being closed down and their proprietors prosecuted for systematic child abuse?

Those children are the next generation of parents, so where are we headed?