Bluejeans: Hope

I’ve just seen the numbers. This month, another set of hopefuls who have passed their professional licensure exams must have gained a gleam in their eyes, probably still celebrating what they have thought of as a great victory. Towards the end of this year, hundreds of thousands or even millions of new nurses, teachers, engineers, criminologists and all other professionals will find themselves in the first steps of their career – confident, believing, imagining.

Ironically, national news reports had been confirming the growth of our unemployment and underemployment rates, (as if we have never known of it); the oversupply of nurses and teachers and other graduates who have resorted to taking call center jobs or even jobs in retail stores, or the unlucky professionals who have spent most of their lives seeking for a permanent job. The truth, however, of the hideous link between population, oversupply of professionals, unemployment, and poverty is kept behind a curtain of cheap optimism. Unable to find a proper solution to these economic problems, our government has been promoting overseas work as a noble alternative to earn a living. For the hopeless professional, it is not just a noble alternative, it is the ONLY alternative – to work and earn a decent wage, not minding the pain and homesickness of being away from home and family.

In this society devoid of humanistic goals, in this society built on enterprise and money - making, and which the new professionals find themselves a commodity, rather than a human being, what is then there left to do?  For some who still hope, they pursue higher studies; they take up graduate school, not on the assurance that they will be employed after, but in hopes that they may be someday, some take up Medicine or even Law, but even Lawyers would chuckle on the fact that there are a lot of them in the country, “throw a stone in session road and you are sure to hit one”.

The dilemma that our generation of today has to face is numbers - more people, more schools, and more competition. New professionals find themselves competing with last year’s new professionals, or even the other professionals from years ago who haven’t been employed until now, or even among themselves. In the process, they are reduced to their innate tendency to self – preservation, call it acts of realism, or maybe, just simply being practical. They are trapped in a suffocating chaos, competing for vacancies of jobs and even of positions; there is not much hope in this “dog eat dog” world, this neurotic society, this jungle that is ruled with only one law: “survival of the fittest”. Whether we like it or not, we will be submerged to the absurdity of life and of living. 

The irony is; we cannot afford to give up even if our ideologies can’t cope up with reality, in the end, we must accept that we can never defeat the system, that we cannot blame the government or the school, our parents, or the “flying cockroach”. We can never make the world revolve around what we want, or what we have exactly dreamed of; nevertheless, even if we have grown cynical with just about everything, perhaps, the best thing is to keep even the tiniest amount of “hope”, that tiny thing left in Pandora’s Box even with all the evils released. Hope that someday, and maybe someday…”things will get BETTER”.