Rally on the Street, Piss on the Concrete

  On August 28, 2015, a religious group called the Iglesia ni Cristo, or the Church of Christ, turned out in huge numbers to protest what they perceived as an attack on them by the Department of Justice. However, I am not writing this from the political or the religious point of view.
  I was inspired to write this blog post because of the disgust I had felt upon seeing how the people rallying outside the DOJ displayed their lack of discipline. Not that I was expecting a rally to be orderly, but I expected some semblance of respect that a hospital and a hospital (not to mention the DOJ) merited.
  I got to school at 8:15, a little early for my 8:30 class, and I stepped over many a prone body on the sidewalk along Faura. Later, I learned that these were INC members who had spent the night there. The huge stage set up in the middle of Faura caught my eye, but I was in too much of a hurry to think about it.
  However, I was forced to recall it when I spent my free period in the library--the blare of speakers was unmistakable. I've had my fair share of disturbances in the library because of ongoing rallies in front of the DOJ, but this took the cake. I could barely hear my own thoughts, let alone study what was in front of me.
  When I was going home, I noticed the piles of trash along the street in front of the school. Food wrappers and containers were littering the street. I cringed inside--a pet peeve of mine is when people throw their trash on the street, and this was like a nightmare to me. A few paces more, and I found myself facing a man who drew his zipper down, and then urinated on the street from his perch on the sidewalk. I was speechless with rage. There were fast-food buildings around us--he could have gone in and used their toilets, there was a mall with rest rooms.
  This led me to the offhand way most people treat discipline. Most of us only have the loosest description of discipline--it's when you say mano po to an elder and touch his hand to your forehead, or it's when you attach 'po' and 'opo' as a sign of respect to people. To some people, discipline and respect end there. As long as you're not directly affecting someone else, you're behaving admirably, right?
  Wrong. One of my pet peeves, as I've mentioned above, is when people throw their trash willy-nilly on the streets. I've seen friends of mine from UP who throw their cigarette stubs on the street and walk calmly away, as if nothing happened. I've always seen discipline as a sign of education. I the following quote on Twitter: "What's the point of your education if you still throw garbage on streets to be ultimately picked up by an uneducated person working?"
  A person's rights end where another person's begins. This line of thinking apparently isn't something that most people consider seriously. Discipline closely ties in with this. Think about it--the next time you throw your trash on the street, consider how it will contribute to clogging up the drainage system when it's raining. It will affect lots of people besides yourself. Going back to the rally, I hope the people, who claimed that they were fighting for their rights, considered other people's, too.
  (However, it was not necessary to piss on the street. If he had to go, he could have walked about a block towards Robinson's. Just saying.)