What can we do to stop people from harming others? This seems impossible. How can we control what others do? Do we need to control them to stop them? Why do the do it? What is it?
Harm is defined in the dictionary as physical or mental damage. For me, to be able to think of something do to prevent people from harming others, we have to know why do we ourselves hurt. So I asked my self, why I harm others. For me, if I ever need to harm others, it is because of survival. To prevent others from harming me in anyway. Survival of the fittest, as they say. A sort of last resort. I would do it to protect myself. So to harm is to survive. Answering this question makes it more and harder to think of a way to prevent others from hurting other people.
I realized that someone actually thought of a way to do this. Religion. If we all believed on a good God, who loves us and would protect us, there won’t be a need to harm other people. But this again is faulty. I then realized that there were instances in the past where religion brought pain. Wars even! But maybe in the first place, religion was not the best way to handle God. And this is why people still hurt others. How to handle God is another matter all together, which I think wont and shouldn’t be handled in this blog.
So what do we do now? Maybe heaven is the only place, if it exists, is where harm is not happening. All we can do is pray.
As I think about this topic, finding hope to solve, if solving would be the right term, even is a far shot to what can be attained. But humans are remarkable on how we can find ways even in the most hopeless cases. There are actually acts to prevent harm, even in the most specific things. I saw this site: http://www.ihra.net/ which deals with lessening the harm done by people who take drugs. Specific. But harm is still not eliminated. I also found another site which prevents as much harm that could be inflicted to children in the school context: http://thearcsf1.blogspot.com/2010/01/call-to-prevent-harm-to-children.html. Specific, yet still deals with prevention.
Maybe stopping harm is a big dream altogether. But if you would look at it in another light, these simple acts of trying to stop harm is actually STOPPING harm. Meaning it is stopping harm in the action sense. This action may not terminate harm altogether NOW, but who are we to say that harm wont stop. It may stop at infinity, by these small simple and specific actions.
But then, need we handle “harm” in a very general way. Maybe we can handle harm in the simplest way. Thinking of this, I thought of how our discipline office prevent harm. It is funny how students look at the DO’s office. Some of them look at it as if it is the enemy of fun. Some look at it as the police and would even want to be part of it. It is said in the DO’s overview webpage that they the Discipline Office (DO) is responsible for promoting student discipline, for ensuring the safety and welfare of the students, and for maintaining peace, order and cleanliness in the University. It seeks to prevent, rather than correct, unseemly student behaviour (dlsu website http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/offices/sps/do/). The student handbook is their set of laws and this is how they would prevent harm. A set of laws can prevent harm they can also be harmful. They can be legal but not legitimate. Being legal is following the laws and being legitimate is justifying and action to be situational-ly correct, well at least in my understanding. An example of which is pleading for self-defense in the act of killing which is against the law. This way the law can at least provide a fighting chance in preventing harm to people from other people. But the thing is, this is still subject to human judgement and biases. People will still decide on this and how can we prevent these people from harming anyone? What if the are corrupt and have personal interests in mind and not fairness? This issue is currently the baseline thought of Filipinos when it comes to the Philippines law. Well at least this is what I commonly hear from people I talk with whom have had been wronged by someone but does not want to do something about it because they lack faith in the government.
So how do we handle this? A biased government not able to function its purpose, as how these people would think. It is good that the Philippines allow globalization, because through globalization, laws from other countries or even international laws can be implemented. Meaning outside influence can help people think better of the government. Examples from people from different countries might give the filipino a new perspective in doing part in preventing harm to other people and themselves.
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