Balance and fairness
What would constitute as balance and fairness in our life and in our many activities and concerns these days?
This is the question many people are asking. And the answer seems to be elusive. But it's important that we just have to learn to find these ideals. Otherwise, with the faster pace of life, every breath we take can be traumatic, every step we make can be harmful.
We cannot deny that our life today possesses a peculiar quality in that we are now faced with so many things—whether they are projects, plans, problems, issues, etc. They don't come few. They come a thousand and one!
The other day, I saw a friend with a gadget sticking out of his ear. I thought it was a hearing aid. He said it was a wireless Bluetooth ear phone, to help him in his multi-tasking, even while he is driving. Frankly, I was horrified!
If we are negligent of our duty to find balance and fairness, we can easily be swallowed by confusion, and prone to react in a mindless way, relying mainly on instincts, with hardly any sense of direction and the consequences of our actions.
If we are negligent of this duty, we can delude ourselves into thinking that we are doing many things, and yet in the end, we fail to achieve what is truly important for us.
Family life often suffers first because of this neglect. Worse is when one suffers loss of health, both physical and mental. Worst is when one loses God and his faith.
I've met a couple who forgot about their wedding anniversary just because both were occupied with their many concerns. Cases of forgetfulness and being distracted, many of them very amusing, are multiplying. A sign of the times?
It's true that everyone has a certain tilt and orientation in life, a certain field of specialization in our work and activities. Still we know, no matter how generic we may feel about it, that we need to have a sense of an over-all goal for us.
This is where we have to do balancing of competing interests and to consider the concrete requirements of fairness, so that we avoid going to extremes of being too specialized or being too general.
In the media, for example, one has to regularly examine himself if he is too negative in his observations and comments, ignoring the many positive developments that will always be there.
More and more of the media audience are complaining that a particular newspaper or TV channel is just good at denouncing, since it hardly makes any effort to affirm something good or to resolve a question satisfactorily. It's prone to be obsessive and ironic.
Or that it is too biased since it airs only one side of the issue, or is too quick to make judgments without due investigation and research. It seems interested only in generating and stoking controversies, trying to keep everyone tense.
Or that it is too frivolous and sensationalistic in its entertainment section, leaning heavily on gossips and other useless but highly sellable items. Or that it is too commercialized, since most of its pages are just cluttered with ads.
Balance and fairness can be a result of a continuing effort to reflect and examine oneself, to consult and hold dialogues with interested parties. These things should be encouraged always. The worst that can happen is when we think we can just work on our own.
In the end what really makes for balance and fairness is when everybody has a living relationship with God. This will obviously provoke howls of protest especially from those who think little of God, if at all. But this is the only way.
At least, the concept of God, if one cannot yet accept the reality, makes one aware of a higher authority and an objective source of rules that clarify what is to be balanced and fair in media, as in our life and activities in general.
We definitely have to break the mentality that states that our own selves are just the source of what is good and bad in life, what is to be balanced and fair.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)