Poverty: A Fight from Within

By Bai Maleiha Bajunaid Candao

Man’s greatest enemy is himself. Everyday he struggles to balance the negative and positive forces interplaying in his thoughts.Despite his attempt to perfect his moral judgment,he still ends up becoming a sinner owing to his own weaknesses.

His moral judgment is clouded by his unmet financial needs for himself and his family. Being unable to deliver the fulfillment of the basic needs of his family torments his personal ego which later affects his positive disposition in life.

Nowadays, money matters the most. Laborers and farmers rely merely on a hand to mouth existence.Criminalities caused by poverty abound.Morality flies out of the window just to put foods on the table, to feed the growing number of mouths of an impoverished home.

Family planning becomes a non-issue for some poor families,but for those who are aware,they refrain to increase the growing number of their families for it is figuratively a death sentence for the unborn members.

This life condition paves the way for a quick-fix mentality to persist.

Carnapping, gun-for-hire livelihood,robbery and other quickest way to solve their financial problems will be embraced by the desperate male members of the family.This is their only way to provide food on the table,send their offspring to school,pay house rent and school fees.

It is not always a prevailing condition but there are many men of destitute lives focus on a struggle anchored mainly on daily survival.This becomes a way of life for them.

This callousness develops a non-remorseful psyche after they committed such lawlessness by justifying their actions with poverty.

In tagalog, this kind of  life subscribes to the “Kapit sa Patalim” mentality.

Hence,we are left with this moral question:Is poverty an excuse to exterminate a life to make more lives survive? This is a question for those whose means of livelihood is gun-for hire in the underground society.

It is true that the rich and poor are not standing on the same ground. A farmer stands barefooted most of the time by choice.He would rather use his savings to buy food than buy a new pair of slippers.A rich man walks with the most expensive pair of shoes and goes home to eat in a table full of costly and nutritious foods.

A farmer feels the pain in his foot as he walks in his farmlot to plant and patiently endure the heat of the sun for a bountiful harvest.The rich businessman rides in his luxurious airconditioned car and gives instructions to his paid employees to do the hard part of the job for him.

But poor or rich alike are capable of living a just and moral life.Man is basically good, but his socio-economic environment sometimes pushes him to his limits just to make his family survive poverty.

Sometimes the leaders that he looks up to are the ones driving him to fight back and become a social outcast.This is the scenario in some Muslim towns dominated by warlords who abuse their power by grabbing the lands of the helpless and hapless.

Not even the Department of Agrarian Reform has aided similar cases like this for the victims chose to keep silent about the violence done against them by the leaders who they elected to protect them are the very ones who oppress them.Their symbolical protectors are their real-life oppressors.

Our farmers are struggling to survive. The least that their community leaders could do is to lighten their loads by ensuring that their rights are preserved and well protected.

This struggle from within is just one phase of life that the destitute could do to better his life.A kind of wishful thinking that gives him hope–a kind of light that shines in his dark world regardless of how unjust the kind of world he lives in.

This is a matter for our present and future government should look into.For poverty as a social disease can bring havoc to the mental attitude of the poor,by formulating a world that justifies criminal activities just  to sustain life. The means will not justify the end. But for them,it will.