Of Peace, Poetry and Passion

 January 9, 1990

Of Peace, Poetry and Passion

As in the past, I would have declared yesterday, Three Kings, the official end of the Christmas season at home, had I not chanced upon Divina Paredes-Japa’s article in the Sunday Globe making a case for January 8, the feast of the baptism of Jesus, as the more appropriate date. So my Douglas Fir, brittle brush as it has become, comes down today (this was written Jan. 8) instead.

Not that anyone really paid much attention to it these past three weeks. Indeed it was the one thing in my household that enjoyed a modicum of peace – for that read oblivion – during this period of agitated incertitude. Now I consign it to the trash bin outside the house, where perhaps it will wait another month before our garbage men deign to notice it, as I, like most, struggle to catch up with the rest of my life.

So what gives currently? Going by the papers, peace in our time. A pooled front page editorial on the subject the Citizens’ Crusade for Democracy and Peace with Justice (now isn’t that a mouthful?) wanted it to be, but I see that only four dailies (aside from this one) I subscribe to have obliged.

They are, in order of fervor rather than sobriety, the Inquirer, the Globe, the Star, and the Times. For the benefit of those who read none other than the national newspaper (Malaya of course), some excerpts from the fiery pens of the nation’s top editorial writers:

“How long must we continue living under the gun? Why do we allow armed men to rule our lives?...How long will we tolerate this situation where a military maniac with an itchy trigger finger has his bloody hands on the throat of an entire nation? – Inquirer (though verily I am reminded of the famous Oratio contra Catilinam: “Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra…”)

Last December 1, the military destroyed in one morning what had taken our people three and a half years to build…The military today is the greatest single, immediate threat to democracy in the progress of our country.” (underscoring supplied) – Globe, the COS’ paper of choice, which by the way is also bent on ferreting out who’s been doing violence to the national budget.

“We have too long languished under the spectre of darkness, we have too long been hostage to bloodshed and violence. We are threatened on all sides by enemies of the people. The Marxist Left who would impose their godless ways on our deeply religious culture. The fascist Right who would bring back the greed and power lust of the tyrant. And the misguided mutineers who for the glitter of gold or misplaced self-righteousness would bring us back to an even more stultifying Dark Age.” – Star

But the editorial which appeals to me the most is the Times’:

“With mindless profligacy, we have squandered the legacies of nationhood and nobility won for us by our forbears who knew what love of country truly meant and unstintingly gave the fullest measure of their humanity to its fulfilment. In our time, and by our own hands, the shining bequest of almost a hundred years of struggle towards freedom and unity has become so much dross.”

But e pluribus unum, as Soliven Maximus reminded us yesterday, “We rush to speak for democracy. But we reserve the right to express our loyalty to it in words of our own choosing.”

For violence is not only mutiny, I dare suggest. Making the masses submit meekly to food prices that are scandalous as our elite fritter millions away of parties, or letting them queue in the rain for hours while the rich and powerful zoom around in Benzes and Pajeros: these marginalize and do violence to our people as well.

Another 4,000 of our countrymen join the ranks of the poor, the hungry and the homeless everyday. That is not gentle peace. That is oppressive tyranny and cruel slavery, for which in the end there will be more than just another coup to pay, trust me.

Meanwhile I am for poetry and passion, as in this priceless gem from Chesterton titled “The Great Minimum” that I have decided to adopt as my mantra for the decade:

“It is something to have wept as we have wept/ It is something to have done as we have done,/ It is something to have watched when all men slept,/ And seen the stars which never see the sun.

“It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,/ Although it break and leave the thorny rods,/ It is something to have hungered once as those/ Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.

“To have seen you and your unforgotten face,/ Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,/ Pure as white lilies in a watery space,/ It were something, though you went from me today.

“To have known the things that from the weak are furled,/ Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;/ It is something to be wiser than the world,/ It is something to be older than the sky.

“In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,/ And fatted lives that of their sweetness tire,/ In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,/ It is something to be sure of a desire.

“Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;/ Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen;/ Let thunder break on man and beast and bird/ And the lightning. It is something to have been.”

To one and all at the threshold of the new millennium: Sursum corda!

To the Rich belongs the Choice

 January 3, 1989

To the Rich belongs the Choice

If the rich are different for you and me, it is because, on final reckoning, they can preach true freedom of choice, where the poor enjoy none.

When I first came upon Bea Zobel’s piece on freedom of choice, I must confess I made little of it. Unlike her, the subject of population growth and family planning little excites me. To each her light, to each his darkness.

Three kids were all my parents wanted. I prefer none but am happy enough to leave to others the task to multiply and crowd the planet whichever way they want.

In China, India, Bangladesh, and Armenia, there have been cataclysms aplenty to set the balance of nature aright. I believe in a higher providence at once merciful and cruel but always wise. I go by that unseen hand that writes our fate with crooked lines.

But the good lady protests a wee bit much. Day after day these past two weeks, I have seen the papers heralding her courage and compassion. I do not know the purpose of such persistence, but I have a rather clear notion of how it thrives, and I do not like it.

If Mrs. Zobel could have her way, she would leave to each and every creature the right to choose the brand or method of birth control she or he prefers. She is for total freedom of conscience in such matters, and so are most of us.

But three things I think need reminding her and ourselves on that account. First, neither science nor conscience is infallible. Second, having embraced our brand of faith, we are bound by it. And third, the poor really have very little choice.

Forty years ago the atom was power in our hands. Today we fret about the threat of holocaust from thousands of nuclear warheads as from hundreds of Long Miles and Chernobyls whose awesome capacity for annihilation we are impotent to contain.

Twenty years ago hitherto our savants worried that we were peopling the globe to extinction. Of late alarm has been raised that we are achieving that extinction, not through overpopulation alone, but through greying societies whose creative energies are sapped by selfishness and over-indulgence.

I assume even Mrs. Zobel would cringe from outright foetal murder, so let us not belabour that method, even if, not unknown to her surely, it is now indiscriminately prescribed in various countries near. Let’s look at “caps” and pills instead, for about these we are less squeamish.

The growing legions of women whose reproductive apparata have been irreparably damaged by IUD’s in the United States has all but brought that contraception to a dismal finish.

And in Germany at least, where the tablet has been a fixture for two decades, the havoc it has wreaked on women’s hormonal constitution has led to its being made available to the end-user by prescription only.

So much for science’s wonders. So others have learned, and so we have not. For lo and behold, all the discards of more “civilized” nations have now become our bane. Outmoded, expired, unsafe, these “wonderful” gadgets are now being dumped on us, and we are reckless in gratitude.

Kawawa naman the poor. There are just too many of them. Let us cure their blights by lessening their numbers. In the process, we can also hold on to the status quo: our maids in uniform, our streets empty of beggars, our backlots rid of squatters, our groceries and shopping malls chockfull of imported wearables and comestibles.

After all, our perverted logic tells us, what ails us must also ail them. We would spare them the weight loss and diminished verve that comes from bearing five children. Tough luck. Would that the millions of others out there had the same luxury of unburdening themselves of such complaints before a paediatrician, a good Catholic, a fine human being.

For them life is a vastly rougher proposition, a perilous gamble. To afford to see a doctor as they must in their twilight, they must first ensure that three of their five offspring survive infancy, two get to school, and one finishes and lands a decent job.

Will less mean more? Supposing we got them around to having just one or two siblings instead. Can we guarantee them more food, more schools, and more opportunities for gainful employment thereby?

Can we promise them a government that is more conscientious and caring, and new breed of elite who are less wasteful and extravagant? Because if we only want less of them so there can be more of us, then all we have is a cop out.

Let the rich then privately salve their troubled souls all they want. The clarity and purity of their conscience being inversely proportional to their worldly stock, the eye of the needle is their lot.

The poor, at least in that regard, have an easier time of it. Harsher though life be for them, the mischief of God appears a better option than the avarice of fellow man. We should not begrudge their believing that his rules are fairer and his surprises kinder than our in the end.