APEROCHO, Catherine Romina F.

11 ABM 9

The Currency of the Future

There is hardly any doubt that words are extremely powerful tools that continuously prove its
supremacy among the lives of humanity. It influenced and built the society we live in today either
through chaos or amity. In truth, words are our own external power that was bestowed upon us. Unlike
emotion or intellect, its job is to express what was once within, outward. However, words have no value
of their own until they are not revealed and would only be concealed inside a person. Its whole
existence solely relies as to what the emotion or the mind has to express and yet it became a beacon to
innovation and destruction when humanity used it to their own personal advantage. It became a
weapon, to instigate another powerful and boundless force which is change.

As cliché as it may sound, we can never put words and change in one sentence without uttering
the saying, "the pen is more powerful than the sword". And indeed, it is. Words go beyond what are
etched on paper and what are spoken by the tongue. Words have amassed the capability to command, to
force, and to lead. Jose Rizal gave birth to the Philippine Revolution using a pen. Martin Luther King Jr.
uttered the very words that would serve as the pulsating engine behind the American Civil Rights
Movement. And it is the very words we write and speak at this very moment that will change the course
of our history. Words are powerful because they are not merely fleeting images and momentary sounds.
They are the sentences within life's rulebook. The phrases in society's laws and policies. The bridge
between intercultural communication. They are the stories of our history and the promise of our future.
The pen is mightier than the sword because it commands the sword itself. Words define change in the
truest sense of the word.

Heraclitus once said that "No man can cross a river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is
not the same man." Banking on the doctrine of universal change, we can say that nothing is permanent.
Only becoming remains contemporary. And we start building such change through words which we are
responsible to translate in action. Words provide us a democratic sense of freedom. A choice to pave the
way to heaven or to pave the road to hell. It already determined the fate of the past and shall be the
currency of the future. It is in the strides of our pens and the echoes of our tongues that will bear the
change we are trying to seek.