Do my sins affect anybody but me?

And this is how it is. We have sins that are both individual, we have sins that are of our family, and then we have sins that are of our nation. In a sense all sin, even individual sin, affects the people around us. I can't tell you how many times somebody has come up for confession, a parent, and they've confessed something, and then the minute that they leave confession their child comes up to confession, and their child's confession is almost the exact same as the parent, maybe one or two things different. So we see this even in families, that the passions that rage in the parents also rage in the children, and the passions of the people in a nation become a collective energy, a collective sin. And so it is that the discipline of God fell upon the Russian people, this chastening, this purification, this judgment of God.