Should have been.

Though it may be late to express my sentiments over the issue, I am deeply saddened about the demise of this young girl, who took her life just to escape the trauma she experienced for forcing her to leave school due to failure of complying with the rules on enrollment fees in a public university, that is run by the government.

I assume this girl must be bright enough to warrant herself a quality education in UP. Not all of the Filipino youth are given a chance to be educated by the best professors in the country; even yours truly was not even lucky to be guaranteed a ticket to this university. And given the fact of having the intellect, plus her obvious dedication for continuous formal learning:

- she should have been praised for excelling in her academic subjects.

- she should have been stressed out for running after a deadly deadline.

- she should have been challenged by a terror professor who doesn't know what effort means.

- she should have been seen marching with flying colors and finish what she has just started.

- she should have been known for her intelligent contributions to her community, to our country and perhaps to the world.

Many are alarmed by the sardonic cause of her death. People keep on pointing their fingers on who should be blamed, when actually it may not be "who", but "what" should be blamed in this issue.

It should have been the system. Let us not blame the people who just comply with it, when this generational passed-on system itself is actually the cause of the problem. Admitting that in the 3rd world country we belong to, it is just hard to cope with the belt-tightening system of capitalism. It may be even worse to accept the fact that even the government-owned institutions are somehow capitalized. This poor girl have been softly killed by our system, too bad she admitted her defeat that early. To those who protest, let us not put all the blame to the people. Reform is all what we need to end ruining more lives of the people who might be potentially able to rise us up from our long-time downfall.

It should have been a miscommunication. I have watched a program segment providing a list of loaning programs of the government to temporarily cover the tuition expenses of a student who cannot be enrolled. If her parents were aware of these programs, perhaps she should have been saved. We have the right to know our privileges as much as the government obliges us to know our limitations and duties as citizens. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, but ignorance of our privileges on the other hand can never be an excuse on our government's end, especially when life is at stake. But in my book, I guess it may be the expense of the media to at least inform the rights of the people, particularly the marginalized. Instead of focusing on the sensational part of the news, let's try to be more informative, more critical and more responsible in delivering the news. But after all, the media, who happens to be our responsible watchdogs failed to even abide by a single media ethics by revealing the name of this victim who belongs to a minor age group. Now, these media institutions are juicing up all their possible sources to get a scoop of the latest story about the death of an iskolar ng bayan, when they can actually use their voice to disseminate stories that could have prevented the incident.

As I am repeatedly mentioning, we keep on blaming people. But actually, it should have been ourselves. We indirectly killed a poor little girl who is eager to guarantee herself a right to education. We citizens have the power in our hands to grow our nation from the crawling buried roots underdevelopment, but we just keep on preventing ourselves in moving forward by putting down the people whom we believe are the ones that should be blamed. We should have been her source of life, but just like this little girl, we kill ourselves softly by allowing ourselves to be hypnotized by the chants of our old evil system. Soon, little do we know, we unconsciously admit our own defeat... too.

Always,