Enter 2009

Originally published in Cebu Gold Star Daily, Vol. 1, No. 99, p. 6 (January 16, 2009, Friday)


I begin my duties here at Gold Star by explaining what my column is all about. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre once taught, “We have no choice but to be free”. It might sound like an oxymoron at first look, but it actually makes good sense. Freedom is not a choice but condition that is placed upon us as rational beings. We are not free to choose or reject our freedom. It is this freedom that capacitates us to navigate through the vast ocean of goods, evils and debatable gray areas in life. To the human person, freedom appears to be like a purely desirable gift, but it is also a tremendous responsibility that we need to guard against our own weaknesses. Free choices range from miniscule events like choosing which coffee beans to grab from the grocery store to colossal steps like whether or not to send young soldiers to fight in a foreign land.


In this short life, we spend most of our time trying to acquire wealth and power. In the right hands, these can be genuine instruments of freedom. Wealth can be used to create industries that provide quality goods and services to the people. This, in turn, creates jobs and livelihood for people who would otherwise have nothing. Power can be used to effect proper change and influence the movers in society to follow a desired path. It can be used to fight for a cleaner environment, better living conditions, greater productivity and a great many goods that can be brought about by a single nudge of power.


On the duller side, power and wealth can be used for purely selfish reasons -- reasons that ignore the human condition and rot the soul. This spiritual cancer is one we see too often in today’s world. Relationships become equated with material gifts and quality of life is mistaken for one’s bank statement. I don’t pretend to imply that enjoying the fine things in life is an evil. I enjoy a good cup of gourmet coffee as much as the next guy. But our patterns of behavior and consumption must be a means to better living rather than an end to itself. We ought to strive for quality over quantity – satisfaction over accumulation.


In a place and time where wealth and opportunities are scarce, we always need to come to terms on a daily basis with the choice of either fending for ourselves or to aiding those in dire situations. We are faced with the challenge of overcoming our baser instincts of survival to live in a higher plane of existence as rational and compassionate human beings. This is the cost of our freedom -- responsibility over our own circles of influence, never cowering from these difficult but necessary decisions. We are free and we have no choice but to be free -- no other choice but to face the chain of consequences that our actions bear. We can choose to add to the suffering or to supply reprieve. 


This is our challenge. And it is only right that we grab a chance to review our lives and what we’ve done with our gifts, our wealth and our power. When we use them the way they ought to be used, we create meaning. We transform work into love and power into inspiration. We become people worth imitating – people that others can be proud of.


So this brand new year can be our opportunity to look into the recent past and see how many lives we’ve improved including our own. Did we act as animals or as human being free from our own destructive tendencies? Every day is a chance to be better than who you were yesterday. And that is all we really need to do to be truly free.


Cheers to a wonderful 2009.

Don't Ask Me About It...

I remember walking around in the mall today, just observing the people... so many different lives... what could they be thinking?


They say love is real... that nothing could be more real than this... but how come so many people die unloved? Why do so many people walk alone in this world? And so we come to the painful realization that love might be real... but it's not for everybody... 


So is it really just some kind of social construct... a capitalist propaganda used to sell beauty products and Hollywood movies? How can it be real when it's too arbitrary... when the standards we set for it are highly elitist and unreasonable -- the exact same standards that we are passing on to our children every day...


People are so obsessed with beauty. Billions of dollars are spent in fashion, fitness and cosmetics each year, just to make people feel worse about themselves... Magazines, movies, music, heck even the automobile, liquor and tobacco industries rely almost entirely on this illusion of beauty... and society's response is this: only the beautiful deserve to be loved.


How about the disabled? The dark-skinned? The burn victim? People who have an acne problems? Fat people? Ugly people? I see so much imperfection in the world burdened with so much sadness. 


My family has been lucky so far... each of my siblings have experienced love at one time or another... but I think about the people who surround me... even my closest friends... and I see the hard-to-acknowledge truth that most of them have never known love... and an even sadder truth is that some of them might never find it in this lifetime... If I could use my own friends as a measuring stick, I would say about 70% of humanity will never find it... and of those who do, they will never understand it... Darwin would have been proud to see all this pain.


I have been a very lucky bastard. Time and again, my friends remind me... and time and again, I forget. I've had my unfair share of love... I cannot count the times I've been hurt just as I cannot account for the girls I have hurt in this short lifetime... but one thing's for sure, I have loved many... and I've been lucky enough to have sometimes known what it is to be loved in return... and though I do not consider myself, by any means, as an attractive man... I have no choice but to consider myself a very lucky one (my closest friends can attest to this).


So why am I still complaining? 


Because in spite of all these things... all the luck... all the experiences... all the insight... I still know nothing... and I don't know what to tell a friend of mine in New York when he asks me about how to attract women... I don't know what to tell my little cousin if he asks me 'how do you know if a girl likes you?' 


All the books, all the poetry, all the crap ever written about it is of no practical importance at all... all the motherhood statements, the cliches, the annoying anecdotes, the idealistic bullcrap have no value whatsoever out there... Out there, it's a jungle... it's a cruel, sadistic jungle... and there are no answers, no strategies, no solutions... love, if it exists, is too arbitrary to be claimed as normal human experience... there are too many factors to consider... and most of them, you'd rather ignore... there is just too much randomness... too much uncertainty... and it makes me nauseous just thinking about it.


It sickens me... I feel this strange churning in my stomach each time someone tells me that he "looks up to me" or that "I have it all figured out"... What the hell is wrong with the world?


My friends, you want me to be honest? Well... I have no freakin' idea what I'm doing. Not a goddamn clue. 


My only advice: Prepare yourself for a lot of pain.