Out of the box

There is a young man, well, not so very young, who, I believe can be a good subject of a case study for profound educational psychologists. He is on the verge of graduating from college, hopefully with some honors, after a proverbial long and winding road. Why he took his sweet time doing some things other than getting education using his obvious gift must pre-occupy the searching minds of psychologists.  His name is Marlon Magdadaro and at his early thirties, he cannot be better described than being a late bloomer of a student.

In his early school years, he probably thought there was not much to learn because the lessons he shared with peers were rather easy. Without necessarily saying that he was better than most of his classmates, I could discern that the curriculum, to him, did not offer much of a challenge. It could also perhaps be that his teachers might not have recognized his talent such that he was simply lumped with the rest of his batch mates going thru similar lessons.

Both of those factors caused him to lose interest in academic affairs. The result was undesirable. He wandered around. That he might have wasted his talent, he did not know, quite unfortunately. After experimenting with many endeavors, Marlon found employment in a government agency that required minimal college work. For reasons he could not explain, he was allowed to take a sub-professional civil service exam and, of course, passed it. Then, he realized that he needed to have a college diploma to get some promotion.

That was why he had to enroll. What course? It was not planned. Whatever. Wherever he could easily get enrolled was it. Even if he did not intend it, he landed with the young students pursuing Political Science where he is expected to graduate, after being intellectually challenged, soon.

I met Marlon when I spoke against Political Dynasties to a crowd of college students. Little did I know that he organized the forum. How he filled a rather large auditorium with serious listeners amazed me. Yet, when we eventually sat down for evaluation, he, behind his reserved nature of a personality, managed to translate our brief meeting into a higher level of idealism.

Political dynasty is among the most hotly debated topics we hear nowadays. It is interesting to Marlon and me, in spite of our generation gap. As he has learned from his studies, and as I reckon from my lectures on Political Law, we agree that politicians belonging to political dynasties have become the slayers of republicanism. The ascension to power of younger relatives as they succeed the powerful positions of their older generations deprives our country of fresh ideas.

For sure, political descendants do not think “out of the box”.  There must be some vested interests in that box and unfortunately, these are some things that are not shared by the greater mass of the citizenry. Each electoral season, the last decades of our political life, established politicians do everything within their power to keep the box in their fold. In that process, they suppress the other ideas coming from people living outside of their dynasties.

It is very important for the future of this country that we try the leadership of the men and women who do not belong the pedigrees of established politicians. Since the time we have learned to handle the affairs of government, we have left the stewardship of our government to but few political dynasties. Since nobody has a monopoly of knowledge, Marlon and I dare say that there must be some better ideas of running the government and they come from men and women who do not carry the blood of political oligarchs.

I wrote in this column, few weeks ago, our thoughts against Political Dynasties and yes, I received some encouraging feedbacks from readers. I promised them that soon, we shall start a more impactful set of activities. Today, Marlon, given his talent and renewed focus and always thinking “out of the box”, is organizing a few more student forums on this issue and before this year ends, we shall have done something in this direction.