Right and Wrong

by Hadrian Ang (3C)

A painfully loud sound moved across the room and entered my ears, causing a slight annoyance. I slid the table across the ground, painstakingly aligning it to the next one. I moved on to the next table until the whole classroom was all pretty much aligned, at least up to what my young eyes could perceive. Then I moved on to sweep the classroom, drenching myself with sweat in the process. This went on almost every day as I spent many of my after-school hours cleaning the classroom, a teacher’s pet in the truest sense of the word. That was the regular routine for my first and second year in grade school. I did these chores regardless of whether or not I was assigned as a cleaner for a particular day and all of it for a piece of paper with my class adviser’s signature. My fresh eyes saw school as a race for happy grams, which were colorful small certificates given to well-behaved or helpful students. At the end of the year the students with the most happy grams receive “The Happy Gram,” which was a large white certificate acknowledging spectacular behavior for a specific quarter. Back then everything was give and take to me. If there had been no reward for my efforts I would have probably gone home early, just like everyone else. I regularly tried my best to please my parents into giving me something new. This give and take to take more kind of behavior went on until grade 4 or 5.

As we drive through the highway of life we will inevitably encounter splits in the road. We all have ways of finding our way around the complex set of paths. Some prefer to go around alone while some of us would like to use a map, but we Catholics have a high-tech GPS known as God’s guidance, which we can access through an array of GPS devices like the Church’s different teachings and then we can later on save them into our memories to help us in the future. Some may be lost right now or some may perceive the wrong path as correct, but I believe sooner or later we will find the right directions, but it will always be our choice whether or not we follow them. I find myself doing things for a varied set of reasons. I do some things for specific benefits, some to change the way others see me, some to help others or sometimes just because I feel like it. When decisions must be made quickly I find it hard to think of my actions, but when I have time to focus I make my decisions by predicting outcomes. I think moral decisions are those that benefit everyone rather than a single entity no matter the degree of benefit. An event where this applies would be everyone passing a quiz rather than a single person getting a perfect score while everyone else fails. I think there will always be exceptions, but generally I think good decisions are those that allow us to help others so that they may help more people. I also believe in the quote “the end does not justify the means,” because we may be doing things selflessly for the benefit of others, but at the expense of another group of people.

There are many factors and criteria that influence the morality of a certain act, but as we find moral decisions continuously I think focus and prayer would be the best way to determine the right from the wrong.

I have made numerous decisions in my life so far and I know there are many more to come and some may be more difficult. At this point I think the most mature moral decision I have made was joining the Para Kay Kiko (PKK) summer program, which is where student volunteers from Xavier teach public school students from different schools in the San Juan area to prepare them for the next school year. I believe mature decisions are those that give us no material reward, only the fulfillment of doing something good and learning a thing or two. This summer was my second year in the PKK program and I believe joining it was a good decision, because even if I had to sacrifice my vacation time I was able to help others and also learn new things from the experience. The barrier which separates what is right from what is wrong has been something disputed and debated upon by many, but I believe it is there to guide us all. I think we label decisions as right and wrong so that may live out our lives as best as we can. We judge things as right or wrong so that we may be able avoid what we perceive as wrong and try as much as we can to do the right thing. There may be many more reasons behind these things and some may not be fully understood by us yet, but whether or not we understand the reasons behind them we should strive to do the right thing even if it may be the more difficult choice to take.

-submitted as a reflection paper on morality and its stages (High 3 CLE)