Wishful thinking

Except for specific material items, Christmas wishes are mostly wishful thinking, knowing that what we most want may be difficult or almost impossible to attain, but we do so anyway.

- Marianne Go

Keenly aware of that, here is my wishlist anyway.

No. 1 is the staple beauty queen wish - world peace. Why? Because all wars are disruptive. Anywhere in the world, armed conflict affects us all. Our economies are all interrelated - our shared resources of minerals, crude oil, natural gas, marine life, agricultural production and even human movement are all affected by the domino effect of war. Production is often halted, resulting in global supply chain problems; shortages occur in crude oil, food and vital mineral resources, affecting global production. It also leads, eventually, to unwanted human migration, which burdens neighboring countries and leads to more unwanted conflict.

Production and peaceful cooperation are also affected as countries start taking sides, creating a global rift that has not been seen since World War II. Even the United Nations, which was formed in 1945, appears to be having difficulty restraining its members from further conflicts to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.

I hope that global leaders once again come together to truly work on peaceful co-existence instead of creating separate alliances that put the world at risk, with each alliance working on expanding separate spheres of influence and control-economically and militarily.

No. 2 is better quality education for Filipinos. It is disheartening that our nation, once hailed for having good quality education, has now been scoring low in terms of creative thinking assessment by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), with the Philippines now ignominiously ranked among the bottom four among 64 countries.

Filipino students, sad to say, attained low scores at par with Albania, Uzbekistan and Morocco. The Philippines' mean score of 14 is well below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 33.