What even a little girl can do to help BENECO
Pre-Semester Non-Lecture Analysis 41
Tito, I feel so helpless and so little, so insignificant. I’m just a kid. What can I do?”
Katherine, you’re 14 but you’re not playing computer games. Instead you’re surfing Facebook and trying to understand what many adults have no hard time ignoring. You don’t have to understand too deeply. Your tito is a lawyer and I have so many questions. So if you’re struggling to make sense of what’s happening in BENECO, you’re not alone. Just know this: if you read something on Facebook and it touches your heart but you don’t know why, if it makes you angry or anxious you want to cry but you can’t explain it, don’t punish yourself. Just share it. Just share it with somebody who you think doesn’t care right now. Give your other young friends an opportunity to feel the same way you do.
We grownups complicate very simple things. It’s really as simple as YOU think it is: a battle between good and evil. Good must win. That’s why evil tries to pretend to be good, because it wants to win. With us grownups, it can often get away with it. But with your young, more innocent and purer heart, it can’t. All it can do is make you feel inadequate.
You cannot slay a dragon with one huge stab, sweetheart. You bring him down with a million tiny cuts. By just standing up to be counted for good, you could be one of those cuts. You are right, you are just a kid. But when people read about you, I bet you’ll give them courage. A kid will make them just that tiny little bit braver. Even if just brave enough to honk their horn as they drive past.
When I hear that horn, I’ll be thinking of you, okay?
“Yes, Tito.”
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”