It is with disgust that I see the deterioration of society around me. Almost daily I read about heinous crimes being committed in our nation, it makes me almost afraid to trust anybody.

Only the other day the papers reported a young lady who was robbed of her car after a staged accident but what followed was even worse – as she was stranded on the road she hailed down a lorry to take her to safety and the lorry driver tried to rape her.

Fortunately she got away.

Everything from the ‘Mat Rempit’ menace to child killers to out of control ‘Ah-Longs’, the papers are filled with all these things. Is this perhaps because crime is always high and the newspapers have only become better at reporting them?

Why have things deteriorated so much? Haven’t we become more affluent and successful as a nation? We have built some of the tallest buildings and sent a man into space. We have an educated multi-racial workforce and most important of all is that we are a nation that takes religion seriously, or at least appears to.

Surely faithfulness to God will bring many blessings upon any nation. And indeed, we have been blessed in many ways. However we also have many curses that we can do without.

We can definitely do without political parties that do nothing for the nation but disrupt the peace and unity with their self-serving racial sentiments. We can do without a police force that are so distracted by political concerns that they can’t focus effectively on their primary role ie, to keep us safe.

We can do without a society that is being increasingly polarised by a dysfunctional education system. As an employer I find graduates these days can hardly speak a fluent sentence of English, and we can certainly do without public delivery systems that are biased and unfair eg, the PSD.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for there is so much about our great nation that has room for improvement and these are just basic things. We don’t need landmark achievements like a spaceman, the tallest building or the longest bridge.

What we need is to feel safe, to be fairly provided for by our government, to have a united society that respects each another and an education system that educates instead of focusing on national or racial pride.

We cannot achieve these things on our own so our government, rulers and lawmakers have to take the lead and be sincere. Once the world economy rebounds, I believe many nations will emerge stronger and will be more ready to reap the benefits of the next economic boom.

Our immediate neighbors are an example. We will be left behind if we are not careful, and we don’t want to be a failed state.

Although economically we have grown from strength to strength, socially we are much worse off than we were 30 years ago. I am sure many of us will agree with that statement.