Sunday, August 15, 2004 Obenieta: Summoning Matilda’s spirit By Myke U. Obenieta Sun.star essay
Grace, defying even gravity and as breathtaking as a dream, is picture-perfect. See how a Romanian girl, girding for an Olympic medal, soars and somersaults over a balance beam. Ah, the lightness of innocence. It’s enough for eyes to cast it with longing, lovingly, upon a photograph’s attempt at posterity.
No cameras flashed, however, at the other stories that stick like a burden on the chest, if not a festering sore on the soul.
Who wins in the gymnastics on love over hate or life over death? When little girls aren’t pleasing to the adults’ eyes, if not their hearts, the balance beam might as well take the shape of a hospital bed or, worse, a coffin. And unlike the young dreamers who go out on an Olympian limb, some of the innocents would sometimes fail to rise again from their broken bones and the bruises on their tender skin.
Consider these: A sickly two-year-old girl died after her stepfather reportedly whipped her with an iron wire in Barangay San Roque last week. Three days after it made news, a six-year-old girl barely escaped death after her mother and her live-in partner allegedly took turns hitting her with a piece of dos por dos wood and pouring boiling water on her.
For purposes of propriety, the reports opted not to identify the innocent victims. No photographs, too. All that because, maybe, it’s about losing face and its subtext no less dismal than a fall from grace. Some reporters’ tales must remain as faceless as statistics. Yes, even as it counts and indicts all of us adults into the facing the fact of innocence lost. If we can’t have wisdom’s medallion, there’s always guilt’s millstone. And never mind if we supposed we were unanimous about the United Nations Declaration: “Mankind owes to a child the best it has to give.”
But if truth be told, don’t some ideals sound as farfetched as the possibility of winning an Olympic gold? Sigh only for one certainty: Carrying the torch for children against the threat of domestic violence and other forms of abuse continues to be a make-or-break stunt.
Though the state, the non-governmental organizations and the media are ever alert to flaunt its bleeding heart, the matter of meddling of stopping kids from being killed or injured in adult hands still leaves a lot of muscle to flex. And faster than the finger exercise of dialing 163 for the Bantay Bata hotline, yes.
Elsewhere, it looms--the specter of children combatants at the warfront and street children being decimated by anti-crime death squads, like what occurs in Davao City.
Like a balance beam, if not a circus tightrope, how narrow the foothold some children have in the gallery of nightmares. Either they end up as victims, or brats worthy of Diderot’s oft-quoted contempt: “All children are essentially criminals.”
On behalf of the ill-starred innocents, one can also hope there’s more of twinkle-eyed storyteller like Roald Dahl who can raise the hand of little girls and shove it smack in the adults’ cold-blooded glare. Like his five-year-old creation called Matilda, may some frail-looking girls summon--against the annoyance of adults--enough inner reserves of mind-over-matter power, the patience of martyrs, the wicked humor of witches, and a reckless disposition for revenge.
But that, for those dreaming on, is nothing but gymnastics of the imagination.
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