Living in the ‘Land of the Free’

There was an interesting item in the local newspapers last week that caught my attention and made me wonder if I was reading it correctly. The piece was a story by international news agency Reuters about “jobs being even more elusive for recent US college graduates.” According to the piece, it was taking much longer for college graduates to find jobs, and was even causing them to accept lower paying jobs or positions for which they are overqualified.

The piece further went on to explain that this was still due to the recession in the early 2000s and the more recent economic downturn. It just shows that the job market — especially in certain fields like social sciences and liberal arts — is really just so saturated that transitioning or finding positions in these fields has become quite challenging for recently graduated college students looking for work.

The problem with this is that students who slaved their way through college and struggled with student loans and debts may end up being bitter for having “wasted” their time going to college when they would end up with a job that only requires a high school degree. Not only are they working in fields for which they are overqualified, but unlike their co-employees, they are also still paying the debts for an education that promised them a job in a completely different arena.

I was exceptionally interested in this piece of news because I found it so strange to think that college graduates in the US were having such a hard time finding work, and yet more and more of our college graduates continue to migrate abroad in the hopes of finding better opportunities and greener pastures.

Indeed, nearly everyone in the Philippines has a close relative — brother, sister, parent, child — in the United States where they have gone to look for better opportunities. Many even go there illegally in the hopes of finding work and perhaps gaining citizenship through either marriage or if the government declares another amnesty program. You would be hard-pressed to find a Filipino without any relatives or friends abroad. All you need to do is look outside the US Embassy to see the long queues of hopeful Filipinos to know what I mean.

Seeing this news piece made me think — once our countrymen do get to the States, what is it they find there? Granted even minimum wage jobs there may offer them more than they can earn here, there is a tinge of sadness one can’t help but feel to think that a student that worked his or her entire life to get through school and make it through college can’t get any further than a minimum wage job for which their secondary education was simply not needed.

I suppose this is really a sign of the times. A lot of it goes back to the overpopulation problem I cited in my column last week. The world is really too small to accommodate the constantly growing population. Natural resources are scares, space is scarce, and now even jobs are scarce too.

According to the studies, the United States expects to see an upturn jobs by 2022 stating that a college education is still very important despite the current situation. When jobs do start becoming available again, a good education will be a vital thing to have when competing in the job market.

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I’d also like to cite another column I wrote awhile back about taking a firm stand on hardened criminals. I wrote then that, in essence, our society should seriously consider bringing back the death penalty. It seems harsh when you first hear it, but if you look at what has been happening in our country, you will surely have to agree that it is most definitely worth a long and serious discussion.

These days, crime is just rampant on the streets that no one feels safe anymore — anywhere. Not even in their homes. Muggings, robberies, rape, kidnapping, and more are just the norm and criminals are feeling brazen because they are not afraid of the legal system. They are confident that either they won’t get caught or even if they do they won’t be made to pay as steep a price as the crime that they committed.

I recall mentioning Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte in my earlier piece and saying that his brand of “cowboy justice” might be exactly what we need to get results and help rid the streets of criminals and those who would seek to do us harm. I stand by that statement today. Sometimes you have to give “teeth” to those who would go against the bad elements in our society. If you don’t — it’s like sending them to a gunfight without a gun.

Duterte is getting some slack again in the media for calling out the rice smugglers recently by threatening them publicly that if they do not stop smuggling rice into his city he would “kill them.” While it may seem initially harsh, I do not think he should be scolded for resorting to a desperate measure to get results as nothing else has worked in the past. Rice smuggling has cost the government billions in taxes not to mention local farmers who are even bigger victims of this problem. However, a real solution has yet to be found.

While Duterte’s statements may have been severe, it would not surprise me if he got more results from just coming out and meeting the smugglers head on than others have gotten while trying to take the high road. That’s a harsh reality that we have to face — sometimes, in order to beat the criminals, you have to be willing to play their game. It’s important to understand that they won’t hesitate to do whatever it takes to get their way. I think that putting the fear of God in them — as Duterte is not hesitant to do — is a good way to let them know that they will not get away with brazenly committing crimes.

Again, I understand that it is a very fine line. And of course, you don’t want to stumble into a gray area wherein bad guys and good guys blur into one, but I believe that our government should be more aggressive — within the law — when it comes to prosecuting and going after criminals. I believe in human rights of course, but I also believe in justice, and I think that it’s important to take the victim’s and their family’s side for once.