Sunday, July 04, 2004 Obenieta: Out of the blind alley By Myke U. Obenieta Sun.star essay
Everything, the best-laid plots of mice and men included, is vulnerably bare to the monkey wrench of cliché. So goes the gospel of skeptics squinting through their dark glasses: Man, there’s nothing new under the sun.
There used to be a beggar, with sunglasses concealing his blindness, kneeling on exactly the same spot every day at the street corner near Sto. Rosario Church. He could have been a statue, and no one would have noticed the difference. In silence, it seemed he stoically personified the idea of permanence against the flurry of passersby and the flux of vehicles nearby.
But one day he was gone, and did anyone care what became of him? If he died or one of his children made good and gave him a more dignified lease on life, either of which would have sufficed for a semblance of change, wouldn’t it?
Here’s one notion, no less hackneyed, begging for some reality check: Faith is blind.
If it was trite and true that they remain the same the more things change, a begging bowl for a miracle would be something that Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal could hold with as much urgency as a drowning person clutching at straw. “With the elections behind us, the winds of change are at the back of the sails of the ship of state,” the good prelate stressed.
The darkness around us may be dark and deep, as one poet saw it. In the light of the induction of a new set of elected officials, the cardinal called on the faithful to engage in “reflection, dialogue and prayers” for national healing. Can’t we all hunker down with the imperturbable focus of a monk in meditation? Or with the patience, perhaps, of the blind beggar at the street corner, serene in the face of the world’s sound and fury?
Peace and unity and prosperity, these are the stuff of sunlit clichés. These, too, are any dreamer’s star. Far, if not fallen. Or so it seemed to the firebrands perpetually reaching it with the smoke of their protest, no less stale in the mouth. But isn’t that the way things are? No, averred Vidal.
Change, time and again, is of the essence. National leaders need to start addressing “the wounds that have been decaying our national fabric and to begin the process of launching a new life as a country with a sense of unity and hope,” the cardinal exhorted. Setting aside divisive politics is long overdue.
And if our dear cardinal is not one to pull our legs, could he push us into kicking skepticism out of our system? If that’ a task unbearably uphill, he can get a little help from new Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia who literally walked the cardinal’s talk on her first day of office when she visited the various departments in Capitol to take a peek at its nooks and corners.
When she scaled Capitol’s walls to get a view of its rooftop, she might as well have us believe that only the blind can be excused for not seeing hope’s silver lining in the dark cloud of cynicism. She talked of expectations and stressed her intention to work double time, hoping everyone follows her lead because “there’s work to be done.”
True, what we heard was hardly new. “We have to hit the ground running,” she said. But for a while there, how uplifting that a piece of cliché could sound like a prayer.
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