DOMINATION cannot be a necessary fact of human life. It is wrong to condemn oneself to a life that is unfree. No human being has a preordained destiny to suffer and for this reason, it is incumbent upon all of us to examine the true background to oppression in order to uproot this nation from the dominion of social injustice.
Enrique Dussel traces all Third World problems to the egocentrism of the West. For him, the Western way of life is selfish. It reduces everything to money. In contrast to the materialism of consumer society, Fr. Vitaliano Gorospe, SJ, writes that “the fundamental purpose of economic development ought not to be production and consumption, mere profit or domination, but the service of each person.”
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, based on the preliminary results of the 2011 Survey on Children, an estimated 5.5 million children aged 5 to 17 years were working in 2011. The report added that some 2.9 million children were working in hazardous work environment. Furthermore, it indicated that 62 percent of the children in hazardous labor were working in
the agriculture sector, 30.1 percent in the services sector, and the rest (7.6 percent) in the industry sector.
The same report defined hazardous labor as one that “involves exposure to environmental hazards such as physical hazards (e.g., noise, temperature or humidity, slip, trip of fall hazards, etc.), chemical hazards (e.g., dust, mist, fumes or vapor, liquid, etc.) and biological hazards (e.g., bacterial, fungal, viral, parasitic, etc.).”
In “Development as Freedom,” Amartya Sen describes child labor as that “barbarity of children being forced to do things… made much beastlier still through its congruence with bondage and effective slavery.” But Sen also notes that abolishing this form of exploitation may not be enough. Without the corresponding opportunity to enhance their life situation, removing the children from their place of work will be equally problematic.
Sen’s concern is empirical and economic. However, there are deeper moral issues that need to be thoroughly assessed in order to respond to this problem holistically. The basic point is that thousands of children have become the face of modern-day slavery. The reason seems clear—economic alienation. As Pope Leo XIII admonished in “Rerum Novarum”: “The richer class has many ways of shielding themselves and stands less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government.”
Why this moral failure? World powers spend more money on war than in making children safe and happy. According to the United Nations, child mortality has been cut in half around the world in 2015. But it’s not something that people must rejoice. It means five million children under the age of 5 still die each year due to poor health and the lack of access to vaccines.
All rich kids get good education. Majority of poor kids don’t. Tuition in many private schools have become prohibitively expensive. K-to-12 has been suggested to improve the quality of education in the country, but it closes its eyes to the fact that school dropouts mostly come from the poorest families.
Of course, education is not for sale. You cannot really buy good education. Good education is all about character. Poor kids traverse many kilometers of dirt in order to reach their school. They have real lives. Thus, it is ignominious for parents of rich kids to allow their children to waste time on their computer consoles.
Indeed, the freedom that the rich enjoy always comes with a price to pay. But they are not the ones paying it. The poor are the ones paying for their whims. The poor pay it with blood and sweat. Many lives, especially those of the young, are sacrificed so that someone can buy a million-peso gown, a poisonous kind of love borne out of the unforgivable act of oppressing others.
The way some politicians dance on stage tells us that politics cannot save the poor. But the poor need not cry for their forsaken land. Tears don’t build a nation. The future depends on our solidarity as a people—on how we build a life not only for ourselves but also for others.
Karl Gaspar’s call for conscientization has remained on deaf ears. We are all guilty in causing the insufferable lives of poor children. Most of us spend a precious slice of our mortal lives in the virtual world, but what for? Undeniably, we get more delight in feeding our delusions than in finding meaning in caring for the sick and the needy. But giving alms to those who suffer is also not the right thing to do.
The bigger burden on our part, I suppose, is to admit our sins against every innocent dying child.
Christopher Ryan Maboloc is assistant professor of Philosophy at Ateneo de Davao University. He holds a master’s degree in applied ethics from Linkoping University in Sweden.