By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
Among all the tests and requirements that make lives harder for students, it gets easy to be sucked in our own worlds and get hyper focused on the things in front of us. Not fully comprehending the challenges that people our age in different nations face. In other regions, younger people like us don’t worry about thesis papers or tests for tomorrow. They have to deal with war, torture, and loved ones killed in front of them. While the highest form our problems form in late night typing of reports and assignments in our rooms, homes are bombed in war zones at any time.
While we are born to this world as equals, most live on under unfair conditions.
Reading articles about children killed in the middle east forces you to reconsider the view you have of your own problems in school. As we rush deadlines, some rush their children shot by soldiers to the hospital. The escalation of problems faced by other people forces you to reconsider just how much privilege you have, despite living in the Philippines.
But the difference in challenges we face should not be made to keep us docile and remain content with a subpar government. Rather, the suffering of fellow peoples within and outside our borders should enrage all peoples that are exploited by foreign and even corrupt local governments. The masses all over the world have more in common with each other than even their own local elites and leaders.
The lower strata in this nation are also being killed, albeit in a different and slower manner. They are being killed through projects taken away, billions swiped, and prices that scare the common people.
No matter how miniscule, there are still things we can be grateful for in a nation ridden by corruption and all sorts of festering wounds and ugliness. That is no excuse to be docile but an energizer for the desire to get what we deserve as human beings. Even basic food and housing are not absolute for many.
We must recognize the struggle of common peoples to be of international scale. Stuck between two imperialists that has no qualms in bombing and repressing citizens, true freedom for this nation is miles away still.
As graduation season nears and our requirements suck more and more life from us, my own coping mechanism lies in imagining the bigger things in life. The near-death experience that people go through every day, the fight for true freedom in the nation, all of these erase any unnecessary worries. It can be easy after all, when we get hyper focused on the tiny thing in front of us, we forget the big picture and trip over a small thing in comparison to the many things that still has to offer.
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