Life is unfair. You’ve know it ever since you were a kid. You probably wanted a toy so bad that you begged and threw tantrums, only to be disappointed because Mom said you couldn’t have it ‘til Christmas. The next day, you saw your friend holding the exact same toy. You cry once more.
As you grow older, you realize that the world is even more unequal as you once thought.
While you study in the Ateneo, a great majority of the country’s youth do not even reach Grade 6. Statistics can only give so much, but truth be told, as you are reading this, some Filipinos are crying and dying of hunger.
One of the main points of the Millennium Development Goals created by the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. 2010 is ending, and we haven’t seen any changes, except for the global recession which resulted in more people, including OFWs, losing their jobs or getting salary cuts.
We can blame corrupt politicians and capitalist businessmen all we want, but they would all be long dead before they realize that they did nothing to lift this country out of poverty.
Let’s face it. The government would continue busying itself with politics and approval ratings, or developing our economy for the benefit of the big businesses alone. Years would pass before development trickles down to the masses.
Eradicating extreme poverty entails lowering the gap between the country’s wealthy and the poor. But that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. While the richest of this country have enough billions to feed the granddaughters of their great granddaughters, a man had to hold Hongkong nationals hostage just to get his job back and earn meager money for his family.
Even Ateneans are part of the problem. Why, for instance, do seniors avoid going to the urban poor of Manila for their immersion?
So, what’s left for us to do?
We don’t need to be economists to get to the heart of the issue. Former President Arroyo says that she was able to increase our gross domestic product by 7.3%, the highest expansion rate in the last three decades, but that didn’t revolutionize things.
Though it may seem archaic, the answer is a basic rule of life: Help others. And this help extends beyond creating a game show that doles out a week’s supply of food to the poor, or pulling the President’s sisters to give relief goods to fire victims.
Some say that Corporate Social Responsibility is the cure. There was a recent bill filed in Congress about that. Isn’t it a shame that this country needs to have a Corporate Social Responsibility law just to ensure that Filipinos help their kababayans?
Why, after all these years, is the Philippines still poor? We are poor not because we are less developed than other countries; we are poor because our country is more unequal than the rest of the world.
And maybe, as long as there are children in the streets of Katipunan begging for food as you leisurely drink your Starbucks Frappuccino, this country will continue to remain poor.
