Accents
Looking back (1)
Oakland, California - Now that the holiday dust has settled, I look back to the seeds sown yesterday, wondering what they could have yielded on the morrow. Did the words sprinkled in the garden patches of the mind provoke a thought, evoke a smile of acquiescence, trigger an action, and thus help somehow to shape the course of events? I churned fifty columns in 2005, somehow (there is this word again) to "make a difference no matter how small" - fulfilling in part the wish of a long departed father.
Outside, the frost hovers in the air. The trees are left bare of leaves except for the evergreens that have withstood the chill of winter. The laptop on the table invites this winter-stuck grandma, and so, I look back to the output of 2005 that were hewed in the ethical standards I believe in. Looking back to the core values embedded in them because the same stance, viewpoints, advocacies - say principles - will have to buttress doing the write thing in the New Year.
The first Accents column I wrote on my return to Bayang Magiliw June of last year was to welcome my paratrooper cousin Rizalino "Taboy" Rivera. Taboy took my husband Rudy and me to North Carolina's War Memorial Museum of the 82nd Airborne Division to which he belongs. The history of the 82nd Airborne Division from 1917 to the present is unfolded: World War I, WW II, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, and Haiti warfare. I wrote that the peacenik in us would forever protest against war and all forms of violence - believingly only in the power of words to effect change through a peaceful dialogue.
I wrote next about one plane flight when I was seated beside Time magazine's 2003 Person of the Year, the American soldier, and I quote, "A person who has my respect and to whom goes my deep compassionate esteem. Something I could not say of Time magazine's [2004] title-holder, the US President who defied the UN by invading Iraq and, thereby, disgraced America in the eyes of the world - to the utter dismay and shame of many Americans in the entire United States."
On the journalist and poet Carl Sandburg (of World War II vintage), I picked a stanza from his War Poems about the "sixteen million [who] are killing... and killing and killing." " I never forget them day or night:/They beat on my head for memory of them;/They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,/To their homes and women, dreams and games." The poet comes alive, hitting the heartstrings, yours and mine, on the ramifications of the Iraq war or any war for that matter.
On a visit to the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I got a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech he delivered on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1964 in Oslo, Norway. Sterling words decrying oppression and violence committed against his fellow African-Americans. Worthy to reiterate here the excerpts I quoted in my column:
"I accept this award with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.
"I refuse to accept the idea that man is merely flotsom and jetsom in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."
Still another must-see in Atlanta, Georgia is the Carter Center, and I wrote " In the convoluted world of politics, a rare species is a person of integrity and decency. One such a man is Jimmy Carter. This then pays tribute to a world leader who, after exiting politics, continues to earn plaudits, no less a Nobel Laureate for Peace in 2002. Of course, we remember him well as the American President who went to the Philippines to build homes for the country's poor in pursuit of his project, Habitat for Humanity, a worldwide non-profit organization."
The winter of my discontent is replicated in tropical Philippines. "No chill of winter here that gets into my bones. What is so dismaying is to be back to Bayang Magiliw and find it in the same shoddy situation as the U.S. of A., if not worse. We are at the crest of a political crisis with the walkout of the opposition in the House of Representatives in the Aug. 30 impeachment hearing." Here in far-away USA I could only surmise what will happen to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo this January or February 2006. It is not enough for the highest official of the land to say "I'm sorry" to a "lapse in judgment" - calling up a Comelec commissioner to influence election returns. This condemnable action demands her removal from the presidency.
On our Catholic world: "Women own half of Galileo's sky... Do women in cassocks jolt the Catholic mind? Or priests as family men? These pictures may not be far behind, maybe not in the tenure of conservative Benedict XVI. Sooner or later, priests will be allowed to marry, women will be ordained, reproductive rights will be respected more than ever, and same-sex unions will be sanctioned. The future beckons and the Church must face it."
On Boracay, the Philippines' premier fiesta island: "We came on the onset of the rainy season in June when clouds hovered and stole the magnificent sunrise and sunset that had so enthralled us one summer...Even if the island has been cut to pieces by a sundry of developers, the surrounding seas continue to lure tourists, both local and foreign. The congestion of hotels, inns, cottages, restaurants, and talipapas has robbed the island of its natural beauty, but the seas pay off. We did get our fill of sea, sand, and sky. But of course, Boracay is loveliest on summertime - when the wind is a breeze, the waves a whisper, and the sand at its whitest, when an evening walk on the cool sand under a canopy of stars and streaming moonbeams make for a romantic night."
On the University of San Agustin labor strike: "Merciful always brings me to a picture of a hungry child before an empty meal table because his striking laborer of a father cannot put food on it. In stark contrast are the kids of the bosses being fed to satiety. Picture, too, the managers of companies or university presidents themselves as they gorge on food, sumptuous food even if the strike is to last forever...Day in and day out, faculty and students get to see these streamers. USA alumni, USA officials, public officials, priests and nuns, the religious and irreligious see these - all to no avail? How callous can we get? The values we hold sacred got corroded?"
On coming home: "A long stay abroad finds me back to this province of my birth and city of my young days as a student of UPIC (then UP Iloilo College). Having newly arrived, you give the city a once-over: new buildings, new asphalted roads, new bridge, more and more vehicles so denser traffic, fringes of urban poverty ever present, sidewalk vendors as usual, and the ever vulgar signs of Project of this Congressman or of that Politician as if the money spent for this road or that bridge is the President's own money or the Senator's, and not the people's. Ugh!"
(To be continued)