#Harshtag

It’s heartbreaking to think that somewhere in my country right now, civilians are being used as human shields. That instead of worrying about what they’re going to have for dinner tonight, they’re going to have to worry if they’ll even be lucky enough to survive the next few hours. And it makes me feel really guilty for all the inconsequential things I complained about from the moment I woke up today.

It’s a harsh reality, but sometimes we’re all too caught up in our own little tragedies that we fail to look up and see that of the world’s. Unequivocally, some of us would much rather mull over how we’re too lazy to do anything, cursing our laptops for crashing, getting pissed at professors who were taking too much of their sweet time to upload the grades, or gushing over the upcoming breaking bad episode that we become oblivious of the bad that’s actually breaking out in places like Syria, and somewhere much closer to home: Zamboanga.

Earlier today, Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) raided several villages in Zamboanga City and several casualties have already been reported. It was a poster image for pandemonium as classes and works were indefinitely suspended. Flights were cancelled.  Click here to read more about the story.

Here’s an infographic I found c/o @ADDU_Official:

Click image for zoom in

Meanwhile, on God’s hypothetically existing e-mail, prayers are registering by the millions – flooding his inbox with messages of urgency, in all caps, as if that were enough to capture the magnitude of their fears.

The power of social media is unequivocal; it gets the word out so quickly like some kind of forest wildfire during the peak of summer. In a matter of three minutes, 96 people had already put up a tweet that was punctuated with #PrayForZamboanga.

But what was really on the other side of that tweet? Did you really stop to pray for them?