Originally published in the December 2005 edition of ThePalladium for my column Legal Personality.
You cannot embrace a man who is full of sores because the only thing he will feel is pain.
- ANONYMOUS
One of my law professors once told me that our job as lawyers is to prevent, avoid, or resolve conflicts. In my short stay in the ALS, I have found this increasingly difficult to accomplish. Many people these days have this tendency to be oversensitive. They hurt very easily. Nobody can make an honest mistake nowadays. Nobody can take a joke anymore. Today you have to be politically correct in whatever you do and say. People no longer want to hear the truth. They want you to feed them with feel-good lies and expertly-manufactured BS in the guise of positive affirmations that only make them stop trying to improve themselves. You can no longer call a spade a spade without being shrugged and given all kinds of strange looks.
We cannot afford to have feelings anymore… not when everything around us is falling to ruin. “I’m sorry, it was an oversight. Please forgive me”. We just don’t want to tell people that they are wrong. Now, I am not saying that we stop having compassion for those who deserve and need it. I’m saying that we should just stop being so oversensitive. It is just not proper in our calling. One cannot be impartial and oversensitive at the same time. Justice has no feelings. We need to be up and alert, sharp, and discriminating with surgical precision. We are ordinary human beings called to do extraordinary tasks.
People should learn to, once more, stand up on their own two feet. We need to be the Filipinos who once stood tall and proud against our oppressors. Dr. Rizal did not sit at home and cry about hurt feelings. When the Spanish friars offended him (although this might be too much of an understatement), he wrote two books and started a revolution. This is the kind of person that we are being shaped to become.
In the world today, truth is not as important as meaning. Knowing this, we should be watchful in allowing the truth to be drowned in a sea of faulty meanings. We have become a nation of blabbering crybabies while the wealthy reach the top because they don’t give a damn what people say about them. We die with our petty concerns and allow the real opportunities to pass us by unnoticed. People always want to see themselves as the victims. This country has no room for any more victims! With the massive privileges and responsibilities dropped on our laps, we have no choice but to become heroes.
How?
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do your job.
That is all the hero ever has to do.
Originally published in the September 2005 edition of ThePalladium for my column Legal Personality.
The conversation started with a simple question:
Are you happy, Mark?
I could have chosen to answer this question with my ever-casual “yes” and dismiss the subject altogether. But this time, it led me to an unexpected stupor of intensive thought.
A Theology professor once told me that we human beings have an infinite capacity for happiness. Comforting words these are but, consequently, it also means that we will never get to where we truly want to be – our destination is ever-ambulant, always two steps ahead of us – always eluding us. When frustration sets in, we shake our heads, bow down and surrender to compromise. Dreams become encrusted with the rough material of reality. Do we allow ourselves to be repeatedly imprisoned this way? Or do we dare break through?
The Bar Examinations are a few days away. Everything is set.
We are the privileged few. Oftentimes, we hear critics say that we are too detached from the real world – from the masses.
Indeed, we are. We are those who desire to truly live rather than to just survive. It is basic that what is popular is infrequently what is right. To allow ourselves to be swept by the masses is to join those who have been divested of free choice – people who act because of the external pressures brought upon them – people who do what they do because they are left with no other option. They are constantly pushed around by painful externalities – they simply cannot act on their own volition lest they get trampled upon and might even die trying. In this situation – when you fight for pure survival, only self-interest governs.
We are too educated and too fortunate to allow ourselves to be fooled into the same trap. All our lives, we have been stormed with blessings that many others could only fantasize about. As a counterpart, we are necessarily yoked with tremendous responsibilities that we ought never to abandon. It is our paramount duty to elevate others to where we are – to champion them and obtain for them the very freedoms that we take for granted every single day.
We must never apologize for being where we are. However, we must never fail to condemn ourselves for not pulling others up during the climb.
Human beings are flawed by nature. But for the few of us who have been given the necessary facilities to better approximate perfection, that is, excellence, we must do so. Anything less is pure unmistakable injustice.
The conversation ended with a simple phrase:
People like us are never satisfied with the ordinary… and we should never be.
For the 2005 Bar-candidates and future leaders of our nation, I pray that you may never lose your idealism; that you may never allow yourselves to be obscured by the riptide of the masses under the deceptive guise of popular choice, no matter how loud. For the sake of the future of the Filipino people and for humanity, allow yourselves to shine forth for all to see your borrowed glory and take your lead. I implore you to remain steadfast and hold true to your commitment and calling as stewards of justice. Make proud those who have crafted you into incomparably superb tools for bringing legal order to an often chaotic world.
Do not allow yourselves to be just lawyers and pass the bar for its own sake – but be ever-vigilant and strive always to raise the bar to an unprecedented height and embrace your destiny… become the Atenean lawyer.
Come take your fill and reap the fruits of your arduous labor. Remember: infinite capacity. So flex your wings and sharpen your talons. Rest up. You are ready.
No “good lucks” for the prepared. Only three words remain:
ONE BIG FIGHT!
Originally published in the June 2005 edition of ThePalladium for my column Legal Personality.
Remember when you were in first grade, your teacher would always remind you: "It is wrong to steal, to cheat, to lie, to be dishonest."? Even more so for Catholic schools where the word "wrong" is effectively replaced by "a sin".
Have you ever been dishonest in your life? Are you a liar? A cheat? A thief? A criminal?
At the top of your head, it would be very easy to answer these questions with a firm "NO". You would never imagine yourself being called these degrading names – labels that only belong to those people on the streets or in prison.
Let me pose more questions closer to home: "Do you have pirated (stolen) video, music, or software CD’s in your home? Have you ever corrected a waiter who mistakenly charged you for three drinks instead of the four that you consumed? Have you ever cut into a line of people during registration or in a bank just because a friend of yours happened to be there?
Where does this kind of behavior come from when all our lives, we have been taught to love one other, to be good, honest, kind, polite, patient, respectful, obedient, responsible… and all that? Is this really the easy way out? Or can we justify this trend of dishonesty a "necessary evil" for our very survival?
We Filipinos live in the most ridiculous of circumstances. We are a first-world culture trapped in a third-world country. Everyday, we are enticed by the wonders of the modern world: mobile phones, TV’s, computers, movies, shopping malls, video games, designer clothes, signature perfumes, skin-whitening products… these things are added to our cart of "learned necessities" while our means remain less than sufficient to meet even the most basic of our "real" needs. We Filipinos constantly live in denial. We refuse to show the world that we cannot afford to enjoy these things.
So what do we do? We imitate and approximate. We create copies (though inferior) of what other people are enjoying. We try to find some semblance of satisfaction in our lives by pretending to have much more than we actually do.
An optimist would say: Then we are a creative people – Dreamers – people who are resilient and determined to find happiness even in scarcity.
A pessimist, on the other hand would remark: We are truly lost. We deny what is real and focus on the things that can never be. We are plagued by this "national delusion" that would do more damage than good.
Whenever something goes wrong, we immediately blame the government, we blame religion, our superiors, and even the weather? We have nothing but heroic expectations from other people yet we meet our own responsibilities with empty nods and phony grins. We have enough blame in our hearts to go around for the next century and, yet, many of us cannot even find peace in our own households, our barkadas, and in our own relationships.
So... how can we not be dishonest, when even the very life that we live is a lie?
What I say: We are in a place that we need to get out of soon.
Originally published in the March 2005 edition of ThePalladium for my column Legal Personality.
I will never forget these strong, albeit simple, words from a speech that Atty. Medina ardently delivered during the First Alternative Law Groups National Conference: he said, "Lawyers are powerful people". Indeed they are. How else would you characterize an individual who, by his mere words, can send another human being into the darkest and filthiest corners of prison while sapping every ounce of dignity left in him? How else would you describe somebody who can stand before the leaders of this state and convince them that the indigenous tribes of the highlands should be left undisturbed to live in and preserve the lands of their ancestors? These godlike characteristics cannot be taken lightly. The ability to seal the fate of another individual or group of human beings is no small thing that we can just toy around with. The choice on whether to preserve an endangered culture or to relocate entire communities is a both gift and a curse. This is power – and to a great extent, we already have this power even as non-members of the Bar – because we chose to study law.
We, as law students, acquire power every single day. Every statute we master, every judicial decision we comprehend is another weapon and shield that we can use for or against another person. But every weapon can only be as good as its wielder. It can only follow the will of its master. We all have the same weapons at our disposal but it is our duty to decide how they will be employed in battle. We, legal warriors, are free to choose our banners and adversaries – sometimes, they even choose us. We can choose to charge as we hold our heads up high or we can choose to hide in the shadows and strike our unsuspecting victims with treachery. We can use this power to hoard vast amounts of riches for ourselves or we can use it to generate collective wealth by empowering those who surround us. We can use this power to teach those who are defenseless or we can choose to annihilate these ‘easy prey’. We can adhere to the law of the survival of the fittest or we can choose the creed of interdependence and communal survival.
Sooner or later, we will all have to make these choices, not only about which side of the battlefield we will be fighting on but also the methods we choose to employ to win this war. Whom we fight for and whom we fight with will be greatly affected because of this power that we yield. The law is a tool, a weapon – it can do great good or cause great suffering depending on the hand that wields it. We all have to take part in the war, whether we like it or not. The refreshing waters and the blood of our country are in our hands. What happens in the next 20 or 30 years is our burden, our responsibility – it is our problem to solve.
It will, ultimately, be a matter of conscience, discipline and attitude – a continuing choice that we have to make over and over again. We can watch our own backs and eventually be kings of a desolate wasteland or we can find our way together somehow and become citizens of a realized utopia.
We are all warriors. The law is our sword and our shield. We are the generals in this struggle and we choose whom we crush and whom we serve. This onus is a direct consequence of our power. When we chose to be students of the law, we chose power – but we chose to be burdened with difficult decisions as well. Some of us will eventually have to choose sides in the future; some of us already have. But whether we choose to meet our enemies in or outside court, rest assured, we will all be on the same battlefield either as keepers of the peace or instigators of ruin.
So to all of my powerful friends and colleagues... may we have a good fight and may we believe in what we fight for.
