How To Deal

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.