It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- CHARLES DARWIN
How we change… and so often and much in only a single lifetime.
This is clearest when we look at our heroes -- our public icons -- our human torches.
Take the recently deceased high-pitched, crotch-grabbing, energetic pop star that went from being deified to being demonized in a matter of years… and now he is put to rest by a world transfixed with ambiguous feelings and unanswered questions.
Time and again, we see our war heroes and redeemers turn into tyrants. People from humble beginnings become billionaires. Many times we see the good guys give up. Many times we see evil extinguished by conscience.
People have the capacity to live as saints or villains and shift from one personality to the other with relative ease. We have this as a free gift and a harsh responsibility. We determine our truth by our individual choices and our reputation by our habits.
In our own lives, we encounter extremes of transformation… a once funny uncle who just stopped laughing… a friend with whom you once burned the phone line for ten straight hours who just chose to become a complete stranger… a person you once feared who now serves as your role model…
The weak become strong… the dull become colorful… the meek become loud… the arrogant are humbled… the evil finds redemption… and the heroes fall with greed.
Transformation is inevitable. Change is who we are because we constantly seek for that which we do not have. We long to live someone else’s life. We are fascinated by the unfamiliar. We are drawn towards the unknown.
Never mind if we have it all and no apparent right to envy others. The truth is… we always will.
The prince will always have recurring dreams of being the pauper and vice versa a million times over.
But every now and then, we find true rocks in our lives… people who serve as the solid foundations unto which we cling for safety… people who shift and sway, and sometimes leave but always return.
These people shield us from the chaos. They help us find our center and stay on a predictable course, and they will live and die with us through any transformation.
They are the keepers.
They are home.
… and they are the ones we often fail to notice… because with them, we are safe.
After all the excitement... after all the adventure... after all the changes... we always come home. Always.
Published in Cebu Gold Star Daily
Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.
- BILL COSBY
It doesn’t take a professional therapist to know that humor is one of the finest coping mechanisms that the human animal has ever had the good fortune of learning.
Filipinos, more than any other people in my limited experience, have the greatest wealth of humor and its appreciation at their disposal (at par with the Latin Americans, probably). When we dislike what we see around us, our primary reflex is to ridicule it with comments, posters, skits, funny text messages, blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter statuses, and even TV commercials.
Humor is a cool way of telling the truth without being too emotionally transfixed in its ugliness. As a modest people, this is our chosen method of communication, allowing us to avoid the risk of judgment or rejection. We joke about things we casually and instinctively cannot talk about, especially the big four: money, sex, politics, and religion. It makes life easier to take in and our ideas easier to let out.
Knowing who and how we are today, it’s not hard to imagine the Katipuneros of olden times bursting into laughter after one of their members let out a non-so-quiet fart during one of their solemn strategic meetings.
It’s not difficult to think about Dr. Rizal laughing at the funny accents of his fellow Illustrados in Europe while giving their fiery speeches during one of their many dinner parties.
It is not far-fetched to picture Lapu-Lapu's warriors pointing and laughing hysterically at the flamboyantly dressed Spanish soldiers as they landed on the shores of Mactan Island, just before their deadly skirmish.
Humor makes us a malleable people that will not snap with the harsh daily pressures. It doesn’t mean we take nothing seriously – only that our understanding and acceptance of the things we see, hear and experience is cautious and cushioned by a filter of laughter.
We have never had a superior army against a foreign power. So our foreparents scampered away like vermin only to strike again at the next opportune time. A humorless lot cannot pull that off and sustain it for many months at a time.
We never had the wealth of our neighbors, and so we are forced to find riches in our imagination. Without humor, many of us would have jumped off our many cliffs or hung ourselves under our many trees.
We are fortunate in our ability to detach from the material world and appreciate the best in any situation. We are strong in our ability to sidestep danger and dodge pain. We are wise in our ability to search for the truth without emotionally overheating. This is how we survive.
Because of all these, in spite of all the frustrations, and regardless of all the insecurities, we are still one of the happiest people on Earth.
Published in Cebu Gold Star Daily
No law granting a title of royalty or nobility shall be enacted.
- THE PHILIPPINE CONSTITUTION
One of the most unsightly words in the English language is entitlement. It suggests baseless superiority of a group of persons because of accident or the work of their forebears. It suggests that genetics and succession absolutely decide one’s rights and options in life.
What I hate even more is that we allow this to be true by our actions and inaction.
The people who run this country and the world mostly consist of these presumptuous heirs of the wealthy and powerful. They are the landowners who resist the changing social needs and choose to keep their huge tracts of unproductive land for their own pleasure. They are the sons and daughters of privilege, luck, and influence who breeze through life with fancy clothes, nightclubs and designer drugs. They carry their names proudly like banners of moral terrorism against all who live quiet normal lives.
We may not have a nominal house of nobles, but our government seems to act like one. During the past weeks, many of these persons who claim to be our representatives have proved to act only for themselves and those they owe allegiance to. They use culture, breeding, and pretty words to justify keeping what they already have, without moving an inch to improve the lives of those who look up to them for succor.
Feudalism in Europe and Japan has ended long, long ago. But the Philippines still carries the system with pride. People still lord over the poor just as they did during the middle ages. Too bad our nobles do not fight it out as the knights of olden times did. Too bad our system of choosing leaders no longer involves strength, intelligence, and compassion, otherwise we would have a President who is a combination of Manny Pacquiao, Epifanio de Los Santos, and Cardinal Sin. A very tall order, but a striking ideal, nonetheless.
We hate being called a nation of servants to our face, only because we cannot and will not face the unsweetened truth. We are servants under very few but very powerful masters. Most of us live under the poverty line, even after a full degree of college. The poor stay landless and dreamless as they eat scraps from the tables of the greediest members of Filipino society.
And here we are, the educated middle class, caught in the center of a raging storm ready to erupt into cleansing bloodshed. We can either choose to imitate those above us and accumulate everything we can for ourselves, or we can look below us and pull up as many people as we can from their hellish lives.
The good news is that we are not a defeated nation. Everywhere you look today you see collective movements and powerful dissent – clusters of resistance that act as breakwaters that stand against the crashing waves of the tainted and the corrupt. People from all walks of life, young and old, wealthy and poor are coming together to defend human solidarity against those who act only for themselves.
Let us bring down our masters by exposing them for what they truly are -- greedy animals, undeserving of the powers and duties entrusted to them. Let us be merciless in our search for truth so that we might all be able to act with our very best judgment.
To save our country and our people, we must be a nation of servants… and be damn proud of it.
Just got home from my usual urban immersion... and as usual it felt great and terrible at the same time.
Anyway, I finally got to check my phone and there I saw a message from a friend who has been long absent: "Why do I have the feeling that I don't deserve the person I'm with right now?"
Talk about "out of the blue"... but I indulged:
"We deserve nothing. The best you can do is try and be content with what you have."
Indeed, we deserve nothing. Not our jobs, our significant others, our friends, our families, our material graces or our skills.
I went through five years of law school to learn these ideas of justice, equity, fairness and proportionality... but in the end, you realize that all these are just ideas and ideals of such artificial value and character that an extra ounce of critical thinking only leaves us befuddled and trapped in the place where were before: helplessness.
Fairness is not a naturally occuring thing. We never get what we deserve. It's either too good for us or not good enough. Absolute equilibrium is mathematically and realistically impossible. And so, we as free agents try to bridge the gap. We try harder... we work for it so that somehow, we might approximate the propriety of the web of rewards and punishments that orbit our lives.
When we were young children, we were taught to "make things fit". I remember this old toy of mine which had differently-shaped blocks and a plastic tub that had the corresponding hole-shapes on it. The task was to make the triangular block fit into the triangular hole and so on... easy enough right? And so we have been conditioned to understand exactness... to conform to these shapes and sizes and characteristics so that all may be well... problem is, we later learn to apply these assumptions to people as well.
Whenever we see this less-than-presentable dude rest his arm around this lovely lady, an alarm immediately goes off in our head saying "NO!!!"... and we often rationalize it by thinking "He must have some killer wheels" or "He must be dynamite in bed"... and it never occurs to us that this mismatch is the most natural thing of all. We always think that pretty people should be with pretty people and the ugly should stick with the ugly... and so the shapes-and-holes exercise works wonders...
Is it fair? No it is not. But so is the rest of the world. Fairness is an abstract idea that keeps us in line. The Universe has been playing this joke on us all our lives and we don't even bother to question it. We are sucked into romanticism and other forms of mind-control and we use them to cope with the harshest form of reality: life is unfair.
Sure, we love hearing writers and musicians say that "there's always someone out there for every single one of us"... wrong! That's just bullshit, my friends. And you know it. Some of us have had 4, 7, 9, or even 14 relationships in our lives and we don't even give it a second thought... millions of people have lived up to the age of 40 or even 60 without ever knowing the touch of another's hand. The truth is that some people have all the fun... Some people die alone.
We love to dream... we love to hope... but one thing's for certain... it's all unfair... and our ever-changing perception of what's fair isn't helping at all... and as we grow older, our minds start to compromise and we lower our standards more and more that we end up with nothing worth keeping.
So what's there to do about it?
If you want something, just take it. Don't wait for the world to give it to you because it's not gonna happen. It's going to be unfair in any given case, so just take it. If you take it, it's yours... if you don't do anything about it, then maybe you just don't want it enough. If it slips away, then tough luck. You just have to deal with it.
That's all there is to it. Justice will not find you. You just have to make things happen.
My advice to everyone is this: Never hinge your hopes or expectations on an anecdotal singularity or a short series of them. A single instance can mean nothing. Even several instances can fall short of what we can consider as true.
There are flukes in human behavior that are neither measurable nor contained by reason, logic or faith. They are simply abberations in the universal scheme of things. For indeed, we are creatures of habit and any deviation from these habits are not who we are but what we do under the most irregular of circumstances.
This thing we call romanticism is our curse as a human race, fueled by the noxious gases of art and literature. It makes us attracted to chaos -- something that impels us to stick our necks out of our shells, only to lay them softly on the chopping block.
Reality is something we all want to escape from. The human mind can wander to any place without any restriction other than experience. We can revisit our past and explore our future with ease. But none of these can truly emancipate us from the prisons of our own flesh, which carries with it all our limitations and shortcomings. We take ridiculous risks every single day just by leaving our homes. We expose ourselves for all that we are and all that we can never be... and this is always a terrifying prospect for any of us.
The great Ryan J. Roset would sum all these up in one word: "Olats!"
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.
