Accents
I am proud of my daughter
Hot tea that I used to enjoy after naptime could not perk me up after a discouraging news, Aug. 9, on the boob tube: Israeli airstrikes go on; UN Security Council criticized for delayed action in Israel-Hezbolla conflict. The afternoon became even more depressing with the overcast clouds in sporadic downpour.
What to think? write? say? What to pick from one’s hoard of thoughts that will make sense in a world gone war-weary? Search for something positive to hang on? Where? Is this why I thought of this title for a column? Because one has to snatch at rays of hope whenever one possibly can. Dispel depression, look no farther, and find comfort in the hearth of home.
Often I’m asked what it takes to make a parent feel so high, and always I answer: when a son or daughter imbibes and lives the values the parents hold sacred and precious. Thus it is with my daughter Rose and her siblings.
Two months before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I swelled with pride to learn that three people close to my heart were in a peace rally, marching along with thousands others in San Francisco to follow the path of peace, not tread the path of war. Coming into the cold of winter were the threesome: my daughter Rose, her husband Timothy, and their son James Raphael, ten years old now thirteen.
Married to a Chinese American from California, Rose is a US citizen and can protest all she can against the policies of her government. If she was still a Filipino in American shores, it won’t be legal for her to go public with her criticisms of the Bush administration, in the same way that she cannot join political demos in the Philippines now that she is an alien to the country of her birth.
By and large, in our own way, my husband Rudy and I were in the mold of the Woodstock “peaceniks” of long ago, loud in both print and the broadcast media in our condemnation of the Vietnam War. In the pursuit of another cause, our voices resonated in the powerful mantra, “Marcos—Hitler, Diktador, Tuta!” as we marched in street demos that led to the downfall of a dictator. And we would have been in the people power at EDSA if we were in Manila and not in far-away Iloilo. Shall I say then that my daughter was a chip of the old block?
I say, Rose embodies the interminable human spirit: outspoken, freedom-loving, fierce in upholding fairness and justice for all. Which is to be a citizen of the world. Which is to be a Filipino, too. A Filipino with his humanity, decency and dignity intact as he confronts the causes of Third World disadvantages, deprivations and degradations on the table of ideas.
Rose and Timothy know what paths to tread as well as they know the paths where “fools rush in.” Let me say that they belong to the class of homo sapiens where sapience rises high — choosing to pit brains and use words to resolve conflicts rather than resort to instruments of war with all its harrowing ramifications. Rose was a scholar at the Asian Institute of Management, her husband Timothy Yee, an honors graduate of the University of California-Berkeley. Both are possessed of minds that can sift the finest grain from heaps of chaff that muddled, baffled, bamboozled the war issue and brought into being the high-sounding “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and the arrogant “Shock and Awe.” They marched with thousands all over America in defiance of the proponents of war and warmongers swollen in verbosity, pomposity, and obfuscations.
Thus did they stand unwavering on the PEACE agenda, braving the winter cold, marching with passion, strengthened only by moral force. By their strong opposition to the Iraq war, Rose and Timothy have instilled in son James Raphael the idyllic, ethical, honorable path to peace.
I continue to dream of generations who will wave high the banner of peace, not war.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)