Observer Editorial-January 2009

The New in the Year

Even as we welcome the blessings of the New Year, we remember the shape and substance of hope for the future.

This hope rests on the recognition that the old year was good, true, but has left us with so many scars, with so many wounds, with so many painful traces in the memory even as we try to make sense of the redeeming stories we can and should remember.

One story is the unforgiving economic meltdown that has affected many of us.

And this story is global--or has become global--as it was a whole scale failure of the globalized economy based on speculation and not, in gist, on our capacity to produce what we need.

Some lessons can be learned from this, and these lessons have something to do with the meaning of "new" in the "New Year".

This sense of newness invites us to do a lot of soul-searching, even as we try to parry all those predictions about what comes to us in the coming year, about which color is going to give us some luck, about which number is going to make us hit something golden, and all other soothsaying this-and-that from some experts about the future life of men and nations and communities.

No, we cannot be held hostage by all these statements that assault us in the morning that we wake up from a good dream about 2010 revealing to us a better revelation about life.

No, we cannot be shanghaied by beliefs that tell us that the positions of the stars and the moon and the sun and the earth will determine when the good luck and the good life will finally come to us.

For the "new" in 2010 is all about substance, meaning, resolve, and faith.

It is the substance of our life ahead: what we can have and what we can become in an ever-renewing sense of what life is all about.

It is about meaning: this constancy of coming to terms with what, indeed, is our life for even as we continually strive to make sense of what was, what is, and what will life be for us in the years ahead.

Certainly, many of us have been tried by 2009.

But certainly, many continue to hang on to the belief that nothing happens that will not give us some sense of who we are if only we tried harder to understand even that which is not easy to understand, and if only we tried harder to accept that which is not easy to accept.

It is about resolve: this inner strength that we need to cultivate in the face of the confusing and the conflicting even as the events come in confusion and in conflict.

By not losing sight of what is--of that which needs to be done in goodness and in fairness--that resolve should remain and should be always there for the summoning when the need arises.

And 2010 is about faith: the faith this year will not come in a silver platter; that it will not offer us all the panacea for all that which ills the world, our lives, and our communities; that it will not come as a manna from the heavens; that it will not be the answer to all our questions; and that it will try us as well.

Rather, the sense of 2010 as our sense of belief is that despite the challenges, we hold onto the renewing power of life, the renewing power of time, the renewing power of people helping each other, the renewing power of communities helping each other, and the renewing power of a world that will come to a fuller understanding of a sense of itself.

A S Agcaoili/FAO, Jan 2010

Editorial-Observer

Editorial

The Giving of Thanks

A grateful nation can never go wrong in much the same way that a grateful heart will always do what is right and fair.

But even as we celebrate this year’s Day of Thanksgiving—even as we reel away from this national trauma we call economic meltdown that seems to have no end in sight—we have a reason to sit back and think through what has happened to the communities of immigrants in this land, communities that are known for their diversity and difference and yet always on the lookout for what makes them in common.

The Day of Thanksgiving is rooted in the acknowledgement that there is something or someone that knows well than what we know.

The Day of Thanksgiving implicates as well the immigrant history of this country that at times, after the immigrants have settled down and stopped moving, have come to look at the other immigrants from a different lens.

No, this country, on the Day of Thanksgiving and beyond it, must take stock of its investment in movement—in migration—as this is what its energy for growth, creativity, ingenuity, community, and vision comes from.

Without this broader perspective, we lapse into forgetting and this whole idea about sacrifice and honor, as is the case of the sacrifice and honor of the veterans who had to fight a war in our name in order for us to have peace, will become hollow and shallow, empty and meaningless.

One lesson we need to underscore on the Day of Thanksgiving is to keep on with the spirit to insist what needs to be remembered.

Another lesson is to resist the idea that remembrance is a perfunctory act of recalling the past as if this past is a relic of what goodness the past had.

No, we cannot.

History must remain our guide in mapping the future for us all; the future that is well rooted in the past-as-present and in the present-as-future.

We fail to see the continuum of time, we fail to see how necessary is our role to guarantee that someone will remember, someone will make it sure that we all become “a member again” of this vibrant, dynamic, socially responsible community of immigrants.

Observer/Nov 2009

Observer Editorial-June 2009

Fatherhood, Nation, and Emancipation

 

The nexus of fatherhood, nation, and emancipation is not obvious, we all agree.

 

If we looked harder and closer, however, we realize these things: that the Philippine nation has been fathered—and mothered too! —by the imagination to evolve a homeland that is free and emancipated from the clutches of oppression.

 

Even as we are reminded of June as the month of Philippine independence and the month reserved to celebrate the deeds of fathers around the world, we are bound to remember as well how the conception of emancipation involves nations and fathers.

 

For while nations are results of a political imagination to build a homeland of the brave and the free, nations carry with them as well the seed of contradictions, with that political imagination itself containing its own seed of destruction when the homeland is not for everyone but for a few.

 

Many nations—many nation-states—all over the world are still guilty of this thing.

 

While there is that public announcement that a homeland has been conceived as a ‘good place’—a ‘utopia’—not every conception has been coupled with practices that are intended to pursue the ends of the good place, which, in fine, also means the ‘good life’.

 

The solons of old talk of this as the common good.

 

The reality today is that this common good is not common as it is a common good for the few, indeed, an irony of ironies.

 

Many of the authors of all these forms of social injustices—the very reason for this absence of emancipatory practices—are themselves ‘fathers’ in the most literal meaning of the word.

 

Many of them are ‘fathers’ of nations, too.

 

Such contradictions are never more real when we look at nation-states with tyrannical leaders who claim that they are the most kind, most caring, and most sympathetic of the lot of fathers.

 

Such contradictions are never more real when we continue to be assaulted by domestic deaths because (a) men kill other men or (b) men kill their wives or lovers or intimate partners.

 

In this Day of Fathers, we can only hope for the best, our hopeful prayer our energy to go on believing that fathers ought not to forget their caring and nurturing side to build up families, people, communities, and homelands.

 

In this Day of Philippine Independence, we can only hope for the best for the Philippine homeland even as we continue to witness the rambunctious ambitions of fathers to turn the homeland into an Eden for the already cynical. 

Observer editorial, June 2009