Kabataang Quezonian: Susi sa Pagsulong ng mga Magsasaka at Sakahan sa Lalawigan.

An old Chinese proverb once said, “If you want to plan for food good for a year, plant
corn. If you want to plan food good for a decade, you plant a tree. But if you want to plan food
good for a lifetime, then you train and educate the youth.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this speech will revolve around two things—“Opportunity” and
“Social Justice.”

Let’s jump and talk about Opportunities. It’s a pretty broad term, I must admit, and it
should be. Opportunity, after all, is so broad of a social concept that every single detail about
society and its growth can be tied back to having accessible opportunities. So how does it
relate to our topic today? Well more often than not, we, the youth, are so fed up with this idea
that we are so much luckier than everyone else and that we are given so much more
opportunities in life when compared to the poorer. With this continued mindset of the youth,
we are essentially taking opportunity for granted. And because of this, we are detached from
the struggles of the masses.

When you know far enough that you are living a much better life here in the city while a
teenager, in the same age as you are, is already working day and night to plow his father’s field
for grains that barely suffice a day’s meal, and then have the audacity to consider yourself
lucky. That is wrong. That is so wrong. Opportunity here has the power to cloud our vision and
pull us away from the harsher realities of life. We have grown so out of touch with the masses
that our best idea of what farming looked like is from a game called Hay Day, where at the
touch of our fingertips, voila! Endless supply of harvest and money! Sadly, that is not what is
happening in real life, not especially in the farms and fields of Quezon.

But this doesn’t have to be the dead end for hope. Opportunity after all, is not bad, only
if we looked at it in a different perspective. One thing is certain; there is no such thing as
perfect opportunities, just people with perfect dreams. And those people are what we need of
the youth to become if we really want to help our farmers and their fields. We need people
who grab the opportunities given to them not because of selfish pride but because of the
willingness to share that opportunity for the benefit of all.

Quezon may not be a rich province, but we are filled with rich minds, rich hopes, and
rich dreams that all together make up the perfect recipe for a bright future.