Anderson Cooper on loss and survival

Hope is the last thing that dies in man. — Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Turn your wounds into wisdom. — Oprah Winfrey

The most famous international journalist in devastated Tacloban City in the aftermath of typhoon Yolanda was the three-time Emmy Award-winning CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper, who strongly empathized with the victims by saying: “It looks like the end of the world, for many here it was... The people of Tacloban have great dignity and deserve better than what they have gotten.” 

Apart from his global fame, his professional excellence as a gutsy journalist and his numerous awards from Emmys to the 2005 Peabody Award for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina in the US, Cooper is also unique for his distinguished lineage. 

His maternal great-great-great-grandfather Cornelius Vanderbilt was the legendary 19th-century tycoon and philanthropist who built the fabled Vanderbilt shipping and railroad fortune, as well as donating the initial gift to found Vanderbilt University which was named in his honor. Anderson Cooper’s father was the writer Wyath Emory Cooper and his mother is the heiress/fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt.

One event in Anderson’s family sparked his interest in journalism and his lifelong passion to chronicle people’s struggles for survival was the 1988 suicide of his then 23-year-old elder brother Carter Vanderbilt Cooper who jumped from the 14th-floor terrace of his family’s New York City penthouse apartment. 

Cooper has said: “Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it’s something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can’t tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper on many sufferings of Jews & the Philippines

Coincidentally, in the past week that Anderson Cooper was at ground zero in Tacloban in the wake of the heart-breaking typhoon crisis, another prominent personage surnamed Cooper but unrelated to him was also here in the Philippines from Nov. 11 to 13. 

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center from Los Angeles City delivered a lecture and conducted an open forum on Nov. 12 during a scholastic event in Makati City. I was invited by the Israel Embassy to be a panelist. The event also opened a photo exhibit chronicling the Holocaust entitled “The Courage to Remember,” commemorating the genocide of six million European Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

An internationally respected humans rights activist and advocate of Jewish causes, Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He helped Rabbi Marvin Hier to found this center in 1977 to uphold human rights, oppose hate and terrorism, defend Jewish rights, and to support Israel and teach about the Holocaust. He has met with many top foreign political and religious leaders, like his meeting just three weeks ago with Pope Francis and his Nov. 13 visit with Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle. Cooper revealed the news that Pope Francis told him that he plans to visit Israel next year 2014.

When asked by a female professor how he could reconcile the fact that the Bible said Jews are God’s “Chosen People” but they have suffered a long history of persecutions like the Holocaust, Rabbi Cooper cited the famous musical Fiddler on the Roof set in 1905 Tsarist Russia, which depicts the travails of the Jewish minority. He compared the numerous racist discriminations, pogroms and crises of the Jewish people to the Philippines’ suffering the brunt of so many natural calamities like typhoons, earthquakes and even volcanic eruptions. Rabbi Cooper, joking, said perhaps Jews and Filipinos should tell God: “Can you do us a favor and choose someone else?” He also added: “One way to survive is to have a good sense of humor.”

After holocaust came miracle of new state, live with indomitable hope

Rabbi Abraham Cooper recounted that earlier in the day on Nov. 12, he had a meeting with some leaders of the Filipino Muslim community who told him that many young Muslims feel a sense of humiliation. Cooper told them that if there ever was a group of people on earth who had a right to say that the rest of the world didn’t do anything while they suffered, it was the survivors of the Holocaust. But instead of bitterness, helplessness or violent anger leading to terrorism, the Holocaust survivors did the opposite.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper said we human beings should not keep on blaming God for all the terrible things happening to us and to our world, but let us thank Him for all the many good things too. 

He mentioned that after the horrific darkness of the Holocaust, which wiped out two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population during World War II and ended in 1945 when the Nazi regime collapsed, a miracle also happened in 1948 with the revival of an independent Jewish nation-state. Rabbi Cooper said: “The Philippines will forever have a place in the memory of the Jewish people, for your offering refuge to Jews during the Holocaust, and for being the only Asian country to vote for the United Nations resolution for the creation of the state of Israel.”

Cooper said instead of dwelling on many unfair breaks in life or wallow in a sense of victimhood, the Jews who went through the Holocaust didn’t only muster the courage to remember the past, but they had the courage to live again. They courageously upheld decency, faith, positive human values and indomitable hope. 

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I believe we in the Philippines should never ever lose hope or a sense of national unity. Let us gain strength as well as wisdom from life’s numerous storms. Whether confronted by the overwhelming humanitarian crisis wrought by super typhoon Yolanda or by the politically divisive pork barrel controversies unleashed by typhoon Napoles, let us not become bitter due to crises, but let us strive to always become better!

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