my topic walked to me

Here’s something I wrote 6 years ago for Sinag, the official college publication of the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy in UP Diliman. It was part of my application for… hm, features editor I believe. But this essay made me a news editor instead. I wonder why.

 Well, I miss those days. I miss them.

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I was in despair in thinking what to write about “children” for my Sinag Editorship application. I’m close to picking up a common theme, when the topic suddenly came to me in dirt-black sando, greasy shorts, and in barefoot saying, “Kuya engeng piso.”
I thought of giving the poor boy a coin but I remembered what was in a billboard I saw somewhere, “Bawal ang Manghingi ng Limos at Magpalimos.” I looked at him for a second, pondered, and then turned my back from the innocent boy desperate for a single peso, convincing myself that it’s a lawful act I did.

As I walked away, I thought of how it is distressing that the law refuses to be kind, yet the government who should be acting on it can hardly do something. How many government officials have religiously thought of solving the problem? How many have dismissed it as merely an unfortunate and inevitable circumstance? Accounting for the numbers is useless, and accounting for it might surprise us that there are more who cares less than the number of street children who knew that they are one of the country’s leading headaches.

The children of the streets don’t get any younger. And unless many take the initiative to solve the problem, they will just grow old by age. They’re not mere perpetrators of our economic downfalls; they are also victims of our negligence. We take part in the cause, simply by looking at them as economic concerns, and not as social beings.

I initially planned for an inspirational essay on children, but what I got to write is rather about a real-life scene that I myself am an actor. A topic on children seemed pleasurable, but what I found was about children who need to be inspired- and educated.

If we fail as a nation to resolve, or even just address the problem with sincerity, all of us can be called unfortunate children ourselves simply by being a failure to the education that made us adults. We then become the children that the streets cannot accommodate

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Written some time in 2002