APEX News - Special Edition
Disclaimer: Articles published express the views of contributing Authors and are not necessarily those of the APEX Board pf Directors and / or the APEX Newsletter Editor.
ETHICS . . . TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
I may get myself into a bee’s nest now but why Ethics at all? Okay, we all realize that one should not use foul language on your site, copy text or graphics without written permission, make our sites child friendly etc. etc. Let’s look at today’s world. All around us we see an increase of unfriendliness, terrorism and aggressiveness. Soccer and football matches are being disturbed by hooligans who seem to find it funny and extremely pleasant to disturb the peace during the matches, causing fear, damage and hurt all around them. Why? Simple, it is fun. At least that is what they believe in. I just read another report on a soccer match here in Holland. A large group of these hooligans disturbed the peace during a match by starting a fight with the next group of people that sat in the next part of the stadium. When it was all under control again, it turned out, that the hooligans were kids between 14 and 18 years old while more than 80% of these were below the age of 15 . . .
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Why so young? Again, it’s simple. They are not being educated any more in the arts of Ethics. A little respect for the elderly, being helpful to your neighbor, minding one’s own business, not damaging other persons property and just using proper language. Here in the Netherlands, where I live, we have many people from Morocco, who seem to have forgotten that they have to educate their kids in being simply nice and pleasant. They do not correct their kids when they are naughty or later on when they actually become obnoxious at large. So, why should they behave themselves on the road or outside the home? After all its fun to beat innocent people into hospital, damage other persons property, scare others and in general, make a mess. How can one possibly do something about them? And there lies the problem in most cases. We wouldn't dare. They would probably start at us. So we walk around such happenings and look the other way. It is so much fun for them scaring and swearing at other law-abiding citizens. After all, they won’t harm you . . .
At home they terrorize the parents, who do not have the guts to correct them or even punish them, as they will get their own back and even bring “friends” to help them in their problem with their parents. It’s the world upside down.
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So, where do we start to get us all back into a better world? By being ethical in our daily life, in what we do and how we approach others. We have to start at the beginning: ourselves next to behaving ourselves and teaching our children to be nice. A small part of being ethical is to make sure that our sites are ethical towards others. That we do not abuse or hurt others, that we make sure we can show our sites to children without them being confronted with the bad sides of this modern world, educating them into being good citizens generally. And to make sure that we can show that we do so, there is, for our site, an association, that is willing to monitor those Ethics and give the site a Seal of Approval, so that we can say: “At least my site helps in promoting a better world, even in a small way.”
That Seal of Approval is the membership of an organization that tries to protect the Ethical behavior of the content of the site in question by testing the content of the site and giving their approval by admitting the site into their membership and issuing a badge to prove that the site complies with the Ethics to which their members wish to comply - to make this world a little better. To educate. There are several good associations around and one of the most important is APEX, the Association of Positive Ethical eXchange. We make a difference!
Acknowledgement: The above article was provided by and is Copyright © to L. Francken 2010 - 2011 with republishing rights held by APEX and may not be republished and/or redistributed without the written permission of the Author.