Did you know Facebook is used more on a weekly basis than Google?
Did you know that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world? Did you know that when you drive through a McDonald’s in the US, the person you could be talking to on the other end of the speaker is possibly someone from the Philippines or India working in a call center?
Did you know that our generation, Generation Y, is the most ethnically diverse in all of history? Did you know that with all the scientific research and technological achievements of mankind, we actually have the capacity to make our world sustainable and peaceful?
We are all riding on such a huge wave of change as an evolving civilization that one cannot help but to be thrilled and excited.
At the same time, there are things to be frightened about. Did you know we’ve reached the seven-billion mark as a population? And did you know that to sustain ourselves as a growing population, we will have to double food production?
We are struggling to find equitable means of production and distribution of food for everyone on the planet, while hundreds of millions of people are going hungry every day. But did you know the wealthiest countries have the power to keep most of the resources to themselves?
Did you know that one-third of our population is at war today? However, it’s ironic that more people die each year, not in armed conflicts—they commit suicide.
While possibilities abound to truly evolve into a peaceful and technologically advanced people, there are greater hurdles we must overcome.
Global problems
These may not exactly be the typical Boracay-planning-job-scrambling things you’d expect from someone who just finished school, but hear me out. The issues our world faces now—overpopulation, global warming and climate change, the shifting balance of power from the West to the East, food and water crises, global economic stability—are the issues that the leaders of today will be passing down to us.
These are the issues that we, the youth, will have to come to grips with when we step out into the real world as the new businessmen and women, engineers, doctors, scientists, artists and politicians of society.
We very well know, however, that these issues will not be solved overnight. In fact, our current leaders are far from reaching any concrete and effective solutions to these global problems.
Do you remember the Copenhagen COP15—the United Nations Climate Change Conference that many were hoping would bring strong and immediate actions from the wealthy, CO2-emitting countries? The result was disastrous, because the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa were not bound to it, to steps to mitigate climate change.
The global food crisis has gotten worse as our population has grown to 7 billion and continues to grow at a faster rate than ever before. While 800 million people go hungry every day, cows in the European Union, the supposed model of continental political and economic integration, get subsidized for $2.50 a day—an amount that isn’t even what half the world’s population lives on.
What about the global economy? Countries are going bankrupt as they realize that the unlimited growth model of capitalism doesn’t work. As the rate of inflation increases and as central banks and national treasuries keep printing more money to bail out too-big-to-fail corporations, the whole financial system is on its way to a disastrous collapse. But this is something that has been brewing since the ’80s, and probably long before that.
Failures
Yet presidents, CEOs, the heads of international banks and monetary funds have failed to make strong, meaningful measures to truly stabilize the economy. And China, economists say, is soon to follow suit, as the real-estate bubble is about to burst.
Speaking of which, tensions between China and the US are growing, and our leaders could allow history to repeat itself as a new 21st-century Cold War develops in the global arena. As the US struggles to remain the most powerful country in the world, China—with its cheap labor, explosive economic growth and emerging military strength—threatens the very principles that the great “American dream” has been founded on.
Moreover, as the US begins to realize that its intervention in the politics of Iran and Iraq, Israel and Pakistan, and North Korea becomes unmanageable, Russia and China are finding good opportunities to turn the tables on the US. And even the Philippines seems to be getting dragged into the political game, as the oil-rich Spratly Islands dispute continues.
Will we choose sides? Will we remain neutral? How can we find diplomatic ways to keep the peace and yet uphold our rightful claim to these precious islands?
The dots are there for anyone to connect, if one would just open his critical eye to what is happening around us.
What we think
I bring these issues up not because I want to scare readers about what looms ahead. My only point is this: The burden to solve these problems will fall on our shoulders sooner than we think.
I just graduated, and now I have to find a job. Will I try to get into a 9-5 shift in a corporation that puts its money in the coffers of politicians and leaders to support its own agenda of accumulating greater wealth and power, just for me to get a big paycheck? Or will I try to follow my convictions and find a job that is meaningful and contributes positively to society even if the pay is small?
I’ve just graduated, and soon, I’ll be getting my own place. How can I find a place that is off the grid and minimizes my own ecological footprint? I studied Theater Arts, so I’ll try to make a difference in this world by helping advance Filipino theater and art and in the process, truth. But how can I keep my integrity and not get sucked into a system that feeds off the materialism and frivolity prevalent in society?
The real world can seem so far away—when we were students. It’s a rude awakening when you graduate and all of a sudden so many responsibilities greet you at the doorstep.
Once, I was excited to crash all the college parties, cram until 4 a.m., and do my best to make the most of my college education.
Beyond that, we must make these global issues part of our common language as young people—as common as Facebook, likes, Internet memes, tweets, Justin Bieber and viral videos.
If we don’t begin to confront them now, while we are young, idealistic, in the perfect environment of the academe where we are free to make mistakes, when will we?
A century ago, the idealistic youth of the 20th century were facing similar unprecedented changes: the industrial revolution, women’s rights, breakthroughs in science and physics, migration. It was an era marked by two world wars and an economic collapse.
We find ourselves today on the same precipice, and we can either fly or fall. It’s all up to us.