Viray: Oratory is a dying art

ORATORY is the art of making speeches to produce a response from the audience. The orator wants to persuade his audience to think or feel in a certain way.

I mourn the death of oratory among our statesmen.

Philippine history is replete with the orations of President Manuel Luis Quezon. He said once “Show me a people composed of vigorous, steady individuals and I will show you a great nation---a nation that will emerge victorious from the trials and better strikes of a distracted world.”

“I have an abiding faith in our people. The Filipino is not inferior to any man or any race.”

“You and I may be working in different spheres of human life, yet you and I are working toward the same goal. A life led without achievement is worthless, and only that life is livable that is dedicated to the achievement of a noble aim. We want to die leaving something behind us so that those who may come after may think of us kindly. That life which ends with death only is a life of the artist nor of the public man.”

Carlos P. Romulo was the first Asian to head the General Assembly of the United Nations. Why? To a large extent because he was a great orator.

He said once:

“…This is our land which has been invaded, and it is our duty to defend it. It is our liberties that are in danger, and we must safeguard them against subversive elements. It is our right to national self-determination and independence that is at stake and it is our inescapable obligation to defend it.”

“…This, my countrymen, is why we are at war. The highest instinct of our nature, the call of our heroic blood, the dictates of our conscience, the logic of our reason, the passionate drive of our will – all bid us to make a stand against the common enemy side by side with America…”

Raul Manglapus, was a topnotch senator and great orator with the Arneow accent. He said once:

“But here, in the land of “Filipino First” he is the last Filipino…”

“Tagalog? Let’s spread it! It is our strongest hope for national unification. Let every man, woman and child speak it at home, in the market, in the office, in the street. Teaching it in schools is not enough to achieve this. The Filipino must learn to hear it, enjoy it, speak it outside the classroom. Tagalog movies! That will do it! Let us make it easy for the producer to turn out more Tagalog pictures. So let us tax his raw film, let us tax his processing, let us tax him on footage, let us tax his gross, let us tax his net – let’s really help him. It’s a good cause!”

“Policy must be reoriented so that vague slogans give way to concrete steps towards the strengthening of the faith of the Filipino himself. And it is not just the faith, the self-reliance of the man in the barrio that must be revived. It is also the faith and the self-reliance of the Filipino middleclass, of the entrepreneur, of the industrialist whose desire to plan, to work and to produce, finds little encouragement in an atmosphere where pull, not planning, influence, not work, are the recognized prerequisites for productive enterprise…”

I hope the young people of today, pause and read the speeches of these Filipino orators – Quezon, Romulo and Manglapus.

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