An indomitable spirit for 2009

Our beloved country has endured a great deal of national trauma, the likes of which I have never seen before. It is a new year — 2009 — and it is as good a time as any to indulge in some degree of circumspection, and find out where we are today.

A lot of the successful executives and leaders of the world perform this kind of self-examination, especially today when the global turmoil is hitting the world in every dimension. Just last night on television and over the Internet news today we saw the report that Adolf Merckle, number 94 in Forbes’ “World’s Richest Billionaires,” threw himself in front of an onrushing train and was found dead on the railway tracks in southwestern Germany. Hours before this happened, an American auction house tycoon was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. And there have been others that have taken their own lives due to the financial collapse of their businesses.

These, among others, are the people we speak of, read and write about, view over television and the Internet every day — sometimes in the headlines, oftentimes in whispers. They have been players, are players, on the world stage and they matter.

And many times we read about some of the world’s poorest of the poor praising God and thanking Him for the piece of bread that landed on their laps as their sustenance for the day. There are millions of these valiant souls in our country today.

If we have no memories, if we do not realize that evil is born and thrives in direct proportion to one’s indifference to it; if we permit the window-dressing and lies to distract or divert us from what we believe is the truth; if fear rather than reason is our only catalyst, then the dark will indeed continue to be upon the face of our world.

And we shall deservedly continue to be swallowed up by the slime and the shame around us. When we have become the “fifth hungriest country in the world”; when we have become the most corrupt country in the continent we live in, it becomes necessary to confront our political and moral environment with courage and rationality, or it will destroy us. It becomes of great urgency to make a decision to be more than just a spectator in life, to graduate from comfortable apathy and participate in the desperate clamor for REFORM!

What you’ll find is that being involved means taking some hits from people who say hosannas to your principles until those principles collide with their backdoor. They’ll tell you honesty’s great until you tell them an unpleasant truth. They’ll applaud your courage until it creates discomfort for them. They’ll salute your loyalty until it’s mistaken for acceptance of anything they do, and they’ll praise your pride until it outdistances their own.

Get involved … do what’s right … be committed … graduate to all of that, and ultimately, the small, the ignorant, the petty, will try to reduce you in size! It’s not a pleasant prospect, but I guarantee you it’s much more attractive and good for the soul than joining their ranks with chewing complacency, without ever coming to bat.

Live your life with a purpose beyond yourself, beyond the luxury that characterizes your everyday existence, and you’ll find out that the world is as bold, broad and compelling as you could ever hope to find. Live it only for yourself, and its limits will always be at arm’s length, and you’ll find out how empty a fair-weather life eventually proves to be.

Not too long ago, there was a phrase in vogue — “the silent majority.” What an obscene phrase in an open society! To be silent is to be dead! The silent majority lies under headstones and lives in urns. We all know the phrase that old folks used to say: “alive and kicking.” It isn’t accidental. Much of folklore is based on truth. When a mother has a child inside her belly and she feels it kicking, she knows something is alive and aborning.

When people just live comfortably ensconced in their suede leather armchairs, with apathy towards the evil that is going on, the sin of omission, of criminal apathy, becomes a sickening realization not only to the others that are meaningfully involved, but pretty soon the same realization will pierce them with the painful truth that they do not deserve their existence. When there is silence, there is terror … they are fearful. Silence is what the Germans of the Thirties experienced and what followed was inevitable.

Blindness to the humanity of other beings — of mothers searching for their daughters and their sons who have been missing for years, of men and women just being robbed of their lives, extrajudicially knocked out of existence, while those who have robbed the lives of others and have been judicially tried and convicted are just pardoned one day and plucked from jail — an excruciatingly painful experience to their victims’ kin; of truth-seeking journalists’ lives just mercilessly cut short by motorcycle-riding hoodlums; and, of course, of the pain one feels when a glaringly inept leadership takes all these in stride.

We have every right to demand that the values of the spirit be given their rightful place. I was told early in life that the key to maintaining social and political involvement and remaining idealistic throughout one’s life was in maintaining a youthful attitude. The late Robert Kennedy, himself an example of young vitality, once defined youth in words that I believe are even truer today in our own Philippine world. He said: “Youth is not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.”

If all we do is preside at board meetings, make more money and even more money as the years go by, and when we feel that because we have made so much already and have set up a foundation, not necessarily because we have a social conscience, but because this is necessary as a tax shield; as necessary as it is to please the political powers that be, then fly to our vacation places in Sotogrande and the French Riviera for what we feel is a well-deserved vacation, then all we are doing is living inside a comfortable — in fact, luxurious — compartment. I said compartment, not apartment.

But the world has changed, Mr. Chairman. Not nearly enough because of the likes of you, but it has changed. And it will change even more because in spite of you, buried deep within the caves of injustice, there is this throbbing of the human spirit, the determination by millions of caring and involved citizens that evil is something to overcome, not to tolerate. There is the need to temper your striving for material success and for the glitter of things with the drive to overcome injustice and misery that incessantly stalk our nation and gnaw at our innards.

We seem to have developed an enormous cynical passivity. We spend so much of our time and attention as spectators, viewers, listeners, part of a vast, faceless audience. This can bring excitement, emotion, certainly a lot of entertainment, but it makes for a synthetic kind of existence.

Without personal participation — and I’d like to address this to the same complacent chairman of the board — a sense of reality fades away, and then it becomes hard to identify values, set priorities, and think and feel with any depth. That’s the reason it is so easy to say, in spite of the wealth, social lineage and business power you have, that indeed you have become paradoxically a social and power climber.

Years ago, I listened in rapt attention to the words the guest speaker at a Yale University graduation was saying: “We have come to believe that our freedom, our civil rights, our democracy — what we have — is maintenance-free. It is not! It requires vigilance and nourishment. That is your responsibility and mine. It is the obligation of all, but it is especially the responsibility of the educated. For when we are fatigued, or believe we should be, when we are frustrated because we are shackled, not redeemed by our best hopes, the tension between perfectibility and fallibility breaks us apart — and we share only a desire to lie low. That is precisely when it is not the time to lie low!”

And today, the first week of the New Year 2009, I cannot help but remember those words, and also, for that matter, that display of nobility of the human spirit, when a student in Tiananmen Square in Beijing kept standing in front of the tanks, preventing them from moving in one direction, and when they changed course, went in front of them.

I have no doubt myself that that kind of indomitability is something that no ruler, however powerful, will be able to overcome. Whatever it is, I still believe that no matter what is happening right now, this is still a moral universe.

This is God’s world and God is in charge.

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