Desperate Measures

This morning while I was meeting with my client, he shared to me a legal dilemma of one of his household help. His helper had a son who applied for work. Unfortunately this son didn’t get to finish his college course. Desperate for the job maybe, when asked to submit his diploma and transcript of records, he rushed to where else but to the so-called “Recto University”. In short, he submitted a fake diploma and TOR to the company he was applying to. The bigger misfortune was – the owner of the company he was applying for turned out to be the owner of the school he “claimed” to have graduated from! Whaaat?!? You wonder, what were the chances of that happening in this big world, right? Talk about bad luck! Now the poor chap doesn’t have a job and even has to respond to a subpoena.

In situations like these, you ask yourself: what should be the proper reaction? A) Times are so hard that you can’t blame people when they take desperate measures to get a job, or B) It’s still always best to do the right and noble thing no matter what.

Just recently my friend Frances blogged about “The right thing to do is not always the safest.” She wrote about an incident when she encountered a man beating up his little kid in a street corner and how her instinct to cry out and scold the man in public almost got her into BIG trouble. A lot of people were walking by and yet only Fran had the courage to correct the appalling scene.

We have been taught from day one at home and in school that we have to do the RIGHT THING. And yet, we grow up doing MORE of the WRONG.

During our last semester in college, a friend of mine, who I have always known to be as a God-fearing person and who was also a consistent honor student ever since our younger years, surprised me a lot when she decided to CHEAT on her final exam. The situation was like this… She said she needed to get 1.25 in that exam so she could finally put the Cum Laude honor in the bag. She was so desperate to graduate with honors. At that time, I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Personally, I didn’t believe in honors and grades. But I could not dissuade my friend any more. So in the end she got her target GPA or grade point average. She graduated Cum Laude from the country’s premiere state university. Her parents were proud.

Multinational companies usually scout for the top university graduates so you could imagine the countless fabulous job offers she must have had after graduation. But just when you’re beginning to imagine her now as a big time corporate hotshot, she’s currently a housewife with a young son, living a simple suburban life and assisting her husband in the family business owned by her in-laws somewhere outside Metro Manila. I’m not saying that’s a curse. It’s a pretty comfortable life actually. All I’m saying is do you think that if she knew beforehand that her future husband wouldn’t want her to go to Law School and pursue her political ambition in our hometown, would she still have cheated to be Cum Laude?

Our passionate dreams and priorities usually push us to pursue certain “wrong” things. My client’s helper’s son probably just wanted a job. We really don’t know why he didn’t get to graduate in the first place. It must have been a financial issue. Ironically, now he has to face expensive legal fines for falsifying public documents. My friend just wanted to make her parents proud and bring along an accolade with her when she steps into the cutthroat and extremely competitive world of law school. Now she’s suddenly part of a family who thinks that her Cum Laude was trivial.

You may have heard by now about the dreadful bank massacre in UP Diliman. Whenever I hear stories like that, I really always wonder about what was in the hearts and minds of those killers. What made them do it? Was it just purely greed? Were they just really evil like those one-dimensional movie villains that we see on screen?

I’d like to believe that they had paradoxically “legit” reasons for committing that crime. Christmas is approaching; they probably had a family to feed; somebody needs expensive medication; a debt to pay… etc. We could easily guess that they were really desperate. For them to kill just to make sure that the money would be snagged easily was extremely horrible for us and most especially to the victims’ families. But like I said, their motivations and intentions have clouded their judgment. From their perspective, they just had a need to fulfill. Enough said.

The fake graduate, the Cum Laude who cheated and the bank robbers/killers… do you really believe that they have a difference? That they’re not the same at all? The former two may just sound like run of the mill cases for most of us while the latter will be downright heinous in our books, but all them being WRONG, even though we think that they’re in different degrees still doesn’t make them RIGHT. At the end of the day, NO GOOD will ever come out of anything that’s founded on a MISTAKE. We’ve all had our own lessons on that.

“… A man reaps what he sows… Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” GALATIANS 6: 7, 9

Funny how they call it “news” when they report the same thing EVERYDAY. Each time you switch on the evening news, the headlines are pretty much within the league of the following: crimes, economic crisis, corruption in the government, impeachment, accidents… Even the entertainment news isn’t “entertaining” anymore. If it’s not a sex video scandal or a celebrity couple splitting up, it’s usually a network war – when another star has jumped over the fence.

Everything’s so predictable. WRONG has become the norm. For me the real NEWS would be when somebody finally does something right. I have friends who complain about their love lives; why their “boyfriends” still can’t seem to commit to them. And then you find out that these alleged boyfriends are either still caught in their annulment cases or worse married. And these ladies actually believe in their hazy heads that one day these frogs will turn into princes in charming. Now do I really need to quote a specific bible verse to point out that foolishness?

I cannot forget one line in the movie “Dangerous Minds” starring Michelle Pfeiffer, when her character, the English teacher said, “Sometimes it takes a lot of wrong answers to get to the right one.” I was 16 years old and at that time I thought I just received good wisdom. Subconsciously I lived out that adage for many years in my young adult life. It was only recently I found out that WE COULD ACTUALLY GET TO THE RIGHT ANSWER RIGHT AWAY! And the answer of course is Jesus Christ.

THEY say desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m very sure that whoever said those; whoever THEY were didn’t have the faith, hope and love that only our Lord God can give.