Trixie Cruz: Death of the Dream

“You’ve got big dreams? You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying … in sweat.”
~Lydia Grant (Debbie Allen) in Fame

(photo credit: gmanetwork.com)

Didn’t you ever have a dream? Didn’t you want to break the bonds of your ennui or poverty or the everyday sameness?

Even Philippine law recognizes the need for the young to be young for as long as they can. The Labor Code prevents child labor, to ensure a childhood for Filipinos for as long as possible.

Even our laws reflect the understanding that there is time enough for the real world to intrude in our cloud castles, but youth is for dreaming, for setting one’s sights on a future that should stretch out wide, wide, wide.

It is unfortunate that it is also the way of the world to intrude where it should not be, to intrude so far that it crushes all hope, all vision, all sight of something better beyond the immediate pressing need.

Youth too is where we pay. We pay with work, with hours spent reading, studying, rushing deadlines.

And it doesn’t end with graduation, in fact, it doesn’t end. But what fuels that work, those long hours isn’t the youth, what fuels all that hard work and sweat is the dream.

Kill that dream and everything else dies.

Does UP kill the dreams of its best and its brightest? Does its constant demand for proof of poverty take its toll on those who must keep trying to produce them? Kristel Tejada had an outstanding student loan neither she nor her family could pay.

Unknown to her, UP says they had re-bracketted her so that her tuition would be free … in the next semester. To avail of it, she had to pay up first. UP admits, however that she did not know she would be re-bracketted.

UP never told her. And in fact, as far as we know UP only made this known now that it is under fire from an outraged public.

UP has had to make policies such as STFAP and has had to make use of its resources to produce more resources.

Considering that the government is hard up – as it perpetually claims – perhaps this is sound policy. But it isn’t sound policy for a state to act as though it is the students who owe them. The state owes its citizens education.

The state owes the best and the brightest the best education.

The whispers that the agents of the state – namely legislators and executive officials – prefer an ignorant citizenry is bound to get louder. We know this for a fact, considering the dismal state of public education in the country.

Despite all its shortcomings, all the budget shortfalls, UP still manages to churn out concerned, aware citizens, armed with enough knowledge to conquer the world. Or so we hope.

Kristel Tejada said she was tired. She tried. But she didn’t make it. She could no longer see the wide, wide future. She could no longer aspire for anything. And so, as the song in Les Miserables goes, “Now life has killed the dream I (she) dreamed.”

By: Atty. Trixie Cruz-Angeles
(Source : PSSST! Centro)







To know more about Trixie Cruz Angeles, check out: I AM TRIXIE CRUZ