Because we have utterly failed to protect our selves from our greatest enemy. Our selves. This eternal nemesis consumes the very souls of those who take advantage of its powers, causing senses to agitate to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish right from wrong. Or never mind right from wrong, just right from left, or the one from the other side of the same coin. Your heart, or mind, or emotion, or moral sensibility—take your pick—tells you to draw all the goodness out of you and to transform them into action but your hands or feet or mouth—take your pick—direct you elsewhere. The soul is willing but the body is weak, as others put it. The same goes the other way you put it, which is that the soul is weak while the body is willing. Of course, none could be far worse than having weakness in both body and soul.
Consider the brazen lack of the sense of propriety of the Palace as a ripe and prime example. On one hand they say that Gloria's lavish dinner is only par for the course, she being the president of this country. But in the same breath, they recognize the fact that thousands of Filipino families can barely have decent meals twice a day. I do not know about her being the president; it is altogether the biggest blunder since dinosaurs roamed the planet. But what I do know is that the gall of the Palace to manifest shades of sincere concern for our hapless fellowmen overthrows any fictional story Tolkien has to offer. For having an insatiable appetite for profligacy, she has created a monster out of her own image, a doppelganger out to destroy its very creator. She fell prey, willingly for the most part of her dire existence, to her most fearsome malefactor—her self. The same holds true to those who grit their teeth at the sight of hapless victims televised during the evening news, limbs protruding to every direction, but forget about them so easily when the night is done. They, too, have failed to shield their own selves from the threats of their own selves, wanting to speak against anything vile but failing to act on it. Treachery can never get any worse than that. We can litter this space with a thousand more.
Hear counts of dead bodies from both sides of the government and the rebels and you hear nothing close to peace. The war has eroded into a lost cause, claiming lives even of those whose only sin is to have been trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time. They who fight tooth and nail for the glory of a wandering revolution up in the mountains and down in the crowded streets have lost sight of what it is that they are fighting for. They who fight with the full blessing of the government have become the veritable symbol of violence in a country where fighting is no longer a word but a sentence—a life sentence. Death reverberates everywhere.
Hear politicians hurl invectives at one another in the hopes of flailing down all the obstacles standing between them and their ambitions. They have turned offices into their own Colosseum, pitting themselves with their rivals in political battles that siphon the few remaining ounces of decency that they have. They perpetually sully their opponent's names with full knowledge that doing so will tarnish the luster of the seat they temporarily occupy. And in so doing, their propensity to inflict all harm than to do any good becomes all the more magnified. Some cannot accept defeat for having been displaced by someone—preferably a prelate—whose mere presence in a public office casts an ominous foretelling on traditional politics. If by tradition we mean to say political dynasties whose roots have grown so deeply embedded in local government positions, then it is an absolute certainty that having someone "new"—in all senses of the word—in an institution staggering in deep organic fertilizer is more like having a pulsating threat to the very life of your family's political hold. To my mind, good news can never get any better than that. To them, there's bad news written all over it.
Or closer to home, hear your neighbors quarrel over an unpaid debt in the heat of the day, or hear them spread gossip faster than swine influenza in the dead of the night and you will hardly have a peace of mind. Or walk down the dimmest alleys of the city during the most unholy hours and you can hardly have a sense of security. For some, that has a lot to do with how the lives of innocent passersby were put to an end after having been knifed, or butchered, to their very last breaths. For others, that has a lot to do with how thieves litter the area, preying on their unsuspecting victims until they commit the deed with all malice and intent to inflict harm. Still, others say that has a lot to do with how juveniles sniff their way to a fleeting nirvana, usually with bottle or plastic on one hand, and making their way through the busy intersections of the metropolis, staggering and with cunning eyes.
Or witness how some indulge in the pastime of singing My Way on top of their throats or lungs in an obscure bar only to be riddled with bullets by a drunk patron who cannot stand the agony of hearing somebody caterwaul. Or sometimes, when bullets do not fly, broken bottles or shards of it do, some flung from one corner to the next, aimed with no accurate precision, until god knows to whose head it lands.
There are a thousand more other stories but all revert us back to the same cause. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot perfectly captures the meaning of what this is all about. Sagan recalls how his experience as an astronaut was "a humbling and character building experience." A very humbling experience. To see the world floating in the vastness of an infinite darkness in all its negligible size compared to the universe is to see how the folly of some men in thrusting themselves to power and wielding it over a fraction of a tiny dot means very little, if not nothing, to what life ought to be, or how we should strive to make the most out of it not for ourselves but for humanity. We can only hope every one of us gets to become an astronaut as a last resort to make us realize what wrong things we have done in our lives.
Consider the brazen lack of the sense of propriety of the Palace as a ripe and prime example. On one hand they say that Gloria's lavish dinner is only par for the course, she being the president of this country. But in the same breath, they recognize the fact that thousands of Filipino families can barely have decent meals twice a day. I do not know about her being the president; it is altogether the biggest blunder since dinosaurs roamed the planet. But what I do know is that the gall of the Palace to manifest shades of sincere concern for our hapless fellowmen overthrows any fictional story Tolkien has to offer. For having an insatiable appetite for profligacy, she has created a monster out of her own image, a doppelganger out to destroy its very creator. She fell prey, willingly for the most part of her dire existence, to her most fearsome malefactor—her self. The same holds true to those who grit their teeth at the sight of hapless victims televised during the evening news, limbs protruding to every direction, but forget about them so easily when the night is done. They, too, have failed to shield their own selves from the threats of their own selves, wanting to speak against anything vile but failing to act on it. Treachery can never get any worse than that. We can litter this space with a thousand more.
Hear counts of dead bodies from both sides of the government and the rebels and you hear nothing close to peace. The war has eroded into a lost cause, claiming lives even of those whose only sin is to have been trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time. They who fight tooth and nail for the glory of a wandering revolution up in the mountains and down in the crowded streets have lost sight of what it is that they are fighting for. They who fight with the full blessing of the government have become the veritable symbol of violence in a country where fighting is no longer a word but a sentence—a life sentence. Death reverberates everywhere.
Hear politicians hurl invectives at one another in the hopes of flailing down all the obstacles standing between them and their ambitions. They have turned offices into their own Colosseum, pitting themselves with their rivals in political battles that siphon the few remaining ounces of decency that they have. They perpetually sully their opponent's names with full knowledge that doing so will tarnish the luster of the seat they temporarily occupy. And in so doing, their propensity to inflict all harm than to do any good becomes all the more magnified. Some cannot accept defeat for having been displaced by someone—preferably a prelate—whose mere presence in a public office casts an ominous foretelling on traditional politics. If by tradition we mean to say political dynasties whose roots have grown so deeply embedded in local government positions, then it is an absolute certainty that having someone "new"—in all senses of the word—in an institution staggering in deep organic fertilizer is more like having a pulsating threat to the very life of your family's political hold. To my mind, good news can never get any better than that. To them, there's bad news written all over it.
Or closer to home, hear your neighbors quarrel over an unpaid debt in the heat of the day, or hear them spread gossip faster than swine influenza in the dead of the night and you will hardly have a peace of mind. Or walk down the dimmest alleys of the city during the most unholy hours and you can hardly have a sense of security. For some, that has a lot to do with how the lives of innocent passersby were put to an end after having been knifed, or butchered, to their very last breaths. For others, that has a lot to do with how thieves litter the area, preying on their unsuspecting victims until they commit the deed with all malice and intent to inflict harm. Still, others say that has a lot to do with how juveniles sniff their way to a fleeting nirvana, usually with bottle or plastic on one hand, and making their way through the busy intersections of the metropolis, staggering and with cunning eyes.
Or witness how some indulge in the pastime of singing My Way on top of their throats or lungs in an obscure bar only to be riddled with bullets by a drunk patron who cannot stand the agony of hearing somebody caterwaul. Or sometimes, when bullets do not fly, broken bottles or shards of it do, some flung from one corner to the next, aimed with no accurate precision, until god knows to whose head it lands.
There are a thousand more other stories but all revert us back to the same cause. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot perfectly captures the meaning of what this is all about. Sagan recalls how his experience as an astronaut was "a humbling and character building experience." A very humbling experience. To see the world floating in the vastness of an infinite darkness in all its negligible size compared to the universe is to see how the folly of some men in thrusting themselves to power and wielding it over a fraction of a tiny dot means very little, if not nothing, to what life ought to be, or how we should strive to make the most out of it not for ourselves but for humanity. We can only hope every one of us gets to become an astronaut as a last resort to make us realize what wrong things we have done in our lives.
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