(Previously published in the Baguio Midland Courier under the column "Speaking Out", October 11, 2009)
If I say that every leaf I see is colored black, would you believe me? Check me, now that would be more definite. If I also regarded your top as unsuitable to the jeans you’re wearing, would you just shrug it off or heed my advice to change?
I am in my right mind. I do not suffer from colorblindness, and I do not really enjoy criticizing garbs for fashion matter. I simply posted the questions above because as far as I have observed, we tend to become what others want us to be.
Paulo Coelho in one of his books brought out this question: “What is the real ‘I’? The answer was simple but challenging: It is what you think of yourself, not what others think of you.
As a teenager, it is no longer new to me if somebody pushes me towards something or forces an option for me to take. As a teenager too, I am prone to manipulation. But I am 18, and haven’t the law express that you are considered to be intelligent if and only if you reach 18?
Sorry if you have not reached your 18th birthday and the law consider you to be not intelligent and excused from not understanding the things around you. But being the ‘youth’—and the hope of the fatherland at that, I think it is not an excuse to be not of legal age and keep on committing mistakes. After all, thinking is one of man’s prerogatives among other creatures.
My instructors usually tell us in class that the youth now are “passive students”. We just eat, we just chew, but we do not digest what we take in. So I also get the idea that we are indeed getting dumber and dumber every day. We lack to see substance. When someone tells us something is to be, then it should be.
It makes us fall then to the negative sense of being followers. We fail to think on our own, and we willingly concede to what culture and the status quo dictates. These are the same reasons why we think leaves are “green” and horizontal stripes hides fat.
It is also very shameful to admit that for times in our lives, we actually rationalized that we do something because everybody does it anyway. Example, when we commit ourselves to certain appointments, we tend to be late and call it “Filipino Time”. Sometimes in class, we cheat and reason out that it is just but normal.
Normal? Then what will happen to our country at the end of the day? We all cheat, we all fail, and we all lose because it is “normal”? No one asked you to ride that boat on the first place. You just resorted to join because it is an easier alternative and it held no commitments.
The point is, if we can’t deviate for the better on smaller issues, then how could we efficiently face the bigger ones soon?
Our world is a better place to live in because of the genius of our predecessors. They were also ordinary people who chose to think outside the box. They invented the technology, they devised the techniques, and they came out with our laws. They had believed that there is a better way than what is already present, and with that conclusion, they worked things out from what everyone says is—even to the extent of being considered insane. Without them, we might still stick to the knowledge that the earth is flat, the sun is a moving body, and that we are held by a turtle.
Going to Paulo Coelho’s challenge, I think it boils down to ourselves as the masters of our fate. Yes, we should listen. Yes, we should learn. But whatever culture dictates is not constant—and the power to change it resides in us.
I am in my right mind. I do not suffer from colorblindness, and I do not really enjoy criticizing garbs for fashion matter. I simply posted the questions above because as far as I have observed, we tend to become what others want us to be.
Paulo Coelho in one of his books brought out this question: “What is the real ‘I’? The answer was simple but challenging: It is what you think of yourself, not what others think of you.
As a teenager, it is no longer new to me if somebody pushes me towards something or forces an option for me to take. As a teenager too, I am prone to manipulation. But I am 18, and haven’t the law express that you are considered to be intelligent if and only if you reach 18?
Sorry if you have not reached your 18th birthday and the law consider you to be not intelligent and excused from not understanding the things around you. But being the ‘youth’—and the hope of the fatherland at that, I think it is not an excuse to be not of legal age and keep on committing mistakes. After all, thinking is one of man’s prerogatives among other creatures.
My instructors usually tell us in class that the youth now are “passive students”. We just eat, we just chew, but we do not digest what we take in. So I also get the idea that we are indeed getting dumber and dumber every day. We lack to see substance. When someone tells us something is to be, then it should be.
It makes us fall then to the negative sense of being followers. We fail to think on our own, and we willingly concede to what culture and the status quo dictates. These are the same reasons why we think leaves are “green” and horizontal stripes hides fat.
It is also very shameful to admit that for times in our lives, we actually rationalized that we do something because everybody does it anyway. Example, when we commit ourselves to certain appointments, we tend to be late and call it “Filipino Time”. Sometimes in class, we cheat and reason out that it is just but normal.
Normal? Then what will happen to our country at the end of the day? We all cheat, we all fail, and we all lose because it is “normal”? No one asked you to ride that boat on the first place. You just resorted to join because it is an easier alternative and it held no commitments.
The point is, if we can’t deviate for the better on smaller issues, then how could we efficiently face the bigger ones soon?
Our world is a better place to live in because of the genius of our predecessors. They were also ordinary people who chose to think outside the box. They invented the technology, they devised the techniques, and they came out with our laws. They had believed that there is a better way than what is already present, and with that conclusion, they worked things out from what everyone says is—even to the extent of being considered insane. Without them, we might still stick to the knowledge that the earth is flat, the sun is a moving body, and that we are held by a turtle.
Going to Paulo Coelho’s challenge, I think it boils down to ourselves as the masters of our fate. Yes, we should listen. Yes, we should learn. But whatever culture dictates is not constant—and the power to change it resides in us.
[Oct 4, '09]
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