How To Deal

This question is, I think, one whose answer we expect to be profound or even impossible to understand. In any case, it appears to be simple. In some way. Watch this: Does God exist?

Here’s the conversation though
Did God create everything that exists?

Does evil exist?
Did God create evil?

A University professor at a well known institution of higher
learning challenged his students with this question. “Did God create
everything that exists?”
A student bravely replied, “Yes he did!”

“God created everything?” The professor asked.

“Yes sir, he certainly did,” the student replied.

The professor answered, “If God created everything; then God
created evil and, since evil exists, and according to the principle that
our works define who we are, then we can assume God is evil.”
The student became quiet and did not respond to the professor’s
hypothetical definition. The professor, quite pleased with
himself, boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the
Christian faith was a myth.

Another student raised his hand andsaid, “May I ask you a question, professor?”
“Of course”, replied the professor.

The student stood up and asked,”Professor, does cold exist?”

“What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you
never been cold?”
The other students snickered at the young man’s question.

The young man replied, “In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the
laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of
heat. Every body or object is susceptible to study when it has or
transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or
transmit energy. Absolute zero (-460 F) is the total absence of heat; and
all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature.
Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we
feel if we have no heat.”

The student continued, “Professor, does darkness exist?”

The professor responded, “Of course it does.”
The student replied, “Once again you are wrong sir, darkness
does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light.
Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact, we can use Newton’s prism
to break white light into many colors and study the various wave lenghts
of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn’t this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe whathappens when there is no light present.”

Finally the young man asked the professor, “Sir, does evil
exist?”
Now uncertain, the professor responded, “Of course, as I have
already said. We see it everyday. It is in the daily examples of man’s
inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence
everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil.
To this the student replied, “Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God.
It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love present in his heart. It’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat, or the darkness that comes when there is no light.”
The professor sat down.
The young man’s name — Albert Einstein.

Source

Having been a law student in the past two months, thinking of it now, it was inevtiable to be trapped in a bubble. With a number of cases, readings and just the idea of being called for a recit, it feels that time isn’t always enough. You cannot escape the feeling after every recitation or quiz that you could have done better, that you could have done  more given another chance. You wake up early in the morning, study until before your class, take your class, go home, study some more and then sleep. That pretty much summarizes the life of this law student. Honest to goodness, I enjoy our classes, the lessons and skills-training in law school. The problem is, we get so caught up in the world of law school that we have inevitably detached ourselves from the rest of the world.

Our professors keep reminding us to be updated with current events and to watch out what is happening with Con-Ass, the Congress, the President… Current events. But with homework piling up every single day, it becomes a task that we have to postpone, or unfortunately, overlook. Who cares about current events in law school? Isn’t it more important, and as a matter of surviving your first year, to be concerned with what the differences are between a void marriage under Article 36, 40, and a terminated marriage under Article 42, what the differences are between justifying and mitigating circumstances, and that the 1987 Constitution took effect on February 2, 1987, the day the sovereign people ratified it? Current events merely gloss over our subjects nowadays. Had I been a law student during the revolutionary government, I would well give a damn to current events. What the hell. If they were actually and already really changing the Constitution I would complain: sayang ang Constitutional Law units ko under THE Fr. Bernas. But it’s just that. Current events have been reduced to sex video scandals, which TV network a celebrity chooses to stay with, whether or not Manny Pacquiao will run as President next year. My goodness. Congress hearings in aid of legislation invite high profile individuals just so people would care.

That’s the thing. People don’t care anymore. We don’t give a damn. And that’s probably the reason why we choose trivial news over those that really concern us. That’s the probaly the reason why we make unintelligible remarks about the government: because we don’t know anymore. It’s either we don’t know or we don’t care. Nowadays, it’s more historic for Manny Pacquiao to win a boxing match than the passage of the law that protects our rights.

I am ungrateful, and I admit it. It’s because we were either born or we grew up without having to live under a dictator. It’s because we grew up with democracy just waiting in the wings that we don’t really know, comprehend and understand its value and what it means. Fine. I’m grateful to EDSA I, but I can’t completely know the significance of its consequences because I don’t know what price I would have paid for democracy. Kwento lang ni Mommy yan, at kahit anong kwento niya, hindi siya magiging bahagi ng karanasan ko: ng nakaraan ko, ng sarili ko. We don’t know the value of freedom of expression, because never were we suppressed and told by the government we’ve created to “shut up.” We don’t know the value of liberty because as far as we are concerned, imprisonment meant grounded ka. Democracy has been loosely used to mean doing whatever we want. It’s not.

It’s frustrating to see people complain about the government because they don’t understand – and the fact that the government doesn’t even do anything to make them understand is all the more frustrating. We have created and lived under an imperfect framework, and rather than address these imperfections, we only complain. Instead of complaining and complaining, isn’t the better question, “What am I doing to address these problems?” Isn’t it better to ask ourselves, “What have we done to make things better for everyone else?”

So a law student lives in a bubble, learning all these things about rights, values, norms and then what? We, law students have been brought up so high, but at some point we have to remain grounded. We have to remember to ground ourselves to what is important, what is relevant, and what is real. Just because we have a perfect exam, does not ready us to the real world. It is our responsibility to eventually become good lawyers, and we cannot become good lawyers if we continue to live in a bubble.

All it takes is one person. Be it Francis Magalona, Michael Jackson or Cory Aquino to remind us about a life outside and apart from law school. Even before being law students, or even just students, we are human. And to be human is to live life. A good recit doesn’t count as a good life.