Making Decisions

Two major sections of our population have to make major decisions at this point. They are our graduating high school students and our voting population.

Many graduating high school students already may have made up their minds in choosing what to pursue in college. They may have based their choices on aptitude tests or college entrance examinations they have already taken. Or they may have based their choices on what they, as children, have long dreamed of doing during the rest of their lives. But there still are many who have yet to decide on what to pursue.

Under our current situation, one major factor that influences the choice of young people is the global job market. The growing job market for nurses, for example, in recent years has led to the rise in enrolment of those taking up nursing. Like herds of animals lured by the scent of greener grazing land, hordes of our young people have been enrolling in nursing schools, prompting many colleges and universities to open up new departments for nursing students. This herd does not include physicians, lawyers, and other professionals who had enrolled and continue to enroll in nursing schools.

I don’t know if the job market should be the overlying force to help young people choose what to pursue. But given our current situation in which young people are left with few choices, choosing a college course that will most likely enable them to land a job in the future is probably the most practical to consider.

Ideally, young people should choose a career path in which they can fully develop their potentials as total persons, and not simply as an employee or OFW. One, for example, can opt to become a farmer who at the same time can teach others about farm and business management and who can promote his products through his own website and who, on the side, can sing songs he himself composed to the accompaniment of a violin or bamboo instrument.

To enable young people to be able to have wider choices may yet need a rethinking of our educational system. For a long time, our educational system has been geared towards producing employees and workers. We have yet to have schools that train young people to become employers and business tycoons. And most of those who get to become business magnates did not learn the ropes of managing businesses in school. Many of these successful entrepreneurs were those who learned what it meant to “get out of the box.”

We had cited before Narda Capuyan who would jokingly say she learned her trade from the non-existent University of Besao. Another is Jack Dulnuan, a successful businessman, whose secrets of success didn’t come from a university but from experience and sheer hard work.

Amidst the limited choices and opportunities we have for our young people in this country of our hopes and dreams, we now have politicians bombarding us with advertised promises to help fulfill our dreams once they get elected. This brings us to another major decision, which we have to make through our ballots on May 14.

In choosing whom to vote for in May, Adrian Cristobal’s advice that the biblical Ten Commandments should be the practical guide for voters may yet work. The first commandment, for example, forbids idolatry. But even candidates who claim to be “pro-God” are relying on the idolatry of machinery and money to win the elections. So we must be wary of those who make machinery and money their idols as they court us for our votes.

The other commandments that forbid killing, stealing, coveting your neighbor’s wife and goods can also guide us in choosing whom to vote for. Killing does not only mean extra-judicially snuffing out lives through the barrels of guns. Killing is also making life harder for some people so much so that they die from the slow death of poverty or from the murderous threats of environmental destruction as a result of legal or illegal logging or other destructive extractive industries. The impact of these destructive industries is magnified during the typhoon season when flashfloods and mudflows bury whole communities. And the culprits conveniently blame nature for the tragedies in which they actually have blood in their hands.

So beware of those who promise to fulfill our dreams. The multi-million funds for a sweet-talking politician’s campaign may have come not from blood diamonds (because obviously diamonds are found in abundance only in Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa), but from blood logs and blood gold.

Another challenge, however, to our decision-making process as citizens is that there actually are a few candidates to choose from. If the Ten Commandments are strictly followed as guide for voters, there might be no one to choose at all. So we have to settle for the choosing-the-lesser-evil formula.

But let’s hope whoever we choose to write on our ballot gets counted correctly by the election commission, which, upon the manipulation of some top guns, has become notorious for not knowing how to count.