Our world today

HAVING had to read rants from everywhere -- the pros and the cons and those who are just out there nitpicking for nitpicking’s sake -- came the desire to just be at peace.

How?

By switching off.

We’ve become too connected, we can now listen and read and feel the rants of a person a whole world away from us, a person you don’t even know and isn’t likely to become a friend. Worse, we even pick up fights against that person who absolutely shouldn’t have mattered to us. That person is a non-entity, and yet we chose to let that person in and be upset.

In a recent gathering, a friend from another region walked over and greeted me. I was happy to see him, I haven’t seen him and his colleagues for maybe a year now. Thus, my greeting was followed by the question, “Who’s with you?”, as I scanned the crowd.

He’s all by himself, he said, because his colleagues who have been joining the gathering since I don’t know when (I don’t regularly attend, that’s why), opted out this year out of fear that somebody might cause them harm. That somebody, by the way, is really a harmless being but who loves to annoy people who has made it an avocation of sorts to pick on him for no other reason but because this somebody decided to take on another career track.

I rolled my eyes at the childishness of it all; the cowardice even.

But I chose to be at peace and thus just told my friend to just enjoy the benefits of the job and stay away from all these pettiness of unimaginable scale.

Taking a step back and watching the goings-on online, we would see people who willfully chose to live with the negatives while living in a false sense of entitlement, expecting that the world will treat them kind in return.

Just yesterday in the news feed, we read about Senator Franklin Drilon expressing worry over the drop in foreign direct investments as reported by the National Economic Development Authority (Neda).

“We note from the reports that there is a deceleration in new investment. This is very alarming. Why such a huge drop? Is this an indication of anything?” Drilon was quoted as saying at the hearing on National Economic and Development Authority’s (Neda) proposed 2018 budget.

Neda has told the panel that the 90.3 percent plunge in FDI was caused by some restrictions, an answer the senators do not accept.

True, it’s an unacceptable answer because the real answer should have been a slap on Drilon’s face. His party stirs up so much controversy and goes around painting a negative picture of the Philippines in their desperate desire to grab power back, and they expect nothing to come out of all those negative spins?

In the past, I would have raised hell and ranted against Drilon.

But no, I choose peace, and so I will just brush off this senator as he deserves to be, and say a little prayer for him; that he may find peace in his heart and that if he can’t, then may God grant him that in whatever way God chooses.

Since unfollowing friends who have the penchant to rant and profess higher knowledge of how to run a country, even when they cannot even win in a popularity contest among a tiny set of friends and thus is most unlikely to ever be tasked to run a country, I’ve enjoyed my days. They never mattered, anyway, and long before social media enslaved us, I never really heard their rants. Why should I now?

We turn off the radio or switch stations when we don’t want what’s playing or what the anchor is talking about. We turn off the television or switch channels when we don’t like what’s showing. Social media is no different.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (John 14:27).

It’s been written in the Bible, but we choose to be human.