|
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Obenieta: Mind over marchers
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
Boars being butchered can do it. So do babies. Bawling our gums out against inconvenience is as easy as gnashing or picking one’s teeth, come to think of it.
Effortless to figure out, too, why a pigsty is no worse than the way things are about this country where its leaders might as well wear diapers. Go ask the placard-waving protesters. You’re not entirely spaced-out if you think progress and peace of mind now seem to be as farfetched as finding a beach resort in Mars.
It takes a harder head, however, to stay stubborn in believing this nation is destined from the mud to the stars. Call it foolhardy. Or, better yet, consider it a creative act of faith. Mental muscle, that’s what it entails to flex up and stretch the possibility of this atrophied-by-cliché assertion: “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”
To insist on raising fists and raining spit against everything awful about our government, a sigh louder than a gargle while wallowing in the “slough of despond,” is to succumb to a failure of imagination. And this, while scratching the scalp, is apparent in the tacit admission that only politicians and policy-makers can make a difference out of our dire straits and sense of drift.
It’s a no-brainer to shove one’s head down the spout of water-down-the-drain woes like corruption and official apathy, redounding to the reflex for either a fight, as in the case of firebrands on the streets. Or flight, as in the tack of those hitching their wish-burdened wagon to greener pastures where they must survive by summoning the power of mind over the matter of alienation.
Walk the talk, that’s how dissent goes the distance. Far beyond, yes, the routine of slogans or the rigmarole of Senate investigations denigrating into “inquiries in aid of destabilization.”
Against the dying of the light---sobriety and ingenuity in finding the way out of the dark---there’s more to do than rage, rage. More urgent is the audacity to keep one’s wits awake for the blinking of the bulb over one’s head. To light candles or to curse the darkness, that is the question.
“My advice is, choose your destiny,” says 59-year-old eagle conservationist Domingo Tadena, one of the finalists for the Third Triennial Awards of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (Rafi) for exemplary individuals and outstanding institutions in the Visayas and Mindanao. “Do what you love to do,” explains Tadena, whose poverty forced him to enroll in high school at the age of 29.
When it would have been convenient to lose hope, he went on to find a scholarship and finished BS Biology at the Ateneo de Davao until he now spearheads various efforts to protect the country’s wildlife and forests. A more fruitful crusade, yes, compared to frittering away his energies by subduing the untamed beast called politics
The imagination to ripen a long-overdue notion, such as fostering a leadership based on moral principles and participatory governance---is something another finalist, teacher Ramon Piang has seen to fruition. He won as mayor in Upi, Maguindanao against a contender from a powerful political clan and received the Galing Pook Award last year for establishing a system of settling cross-tribe conflicts and reducing crime rate in his town by 35 percent.
“We’re doing what we love to do,” agrees Tessie Fernandez, executive director of Cebu City’s Lihok Pilipina Foundation Inc. One of the contenders for the outstanding institution category, Lihok has been foisting programs for women, like credit assistance, and for street children. Who says it only takes an elective posts for one to have the power to create a positive impact on people’s lives?
Not necessarily, as proven by the men and women behind the other nominated institutions like the Brokenshire Integrated Health Ministries Inc., the Maharlika Charity Foundation Inc., the Mahintana Foundation Inc., and the Save Mindanao Volunteers Inc. Because of these groups, the least privileged in the backwaters of Mindanao have been reaping the windfall of health, livelihood, educational and environmental programs.
Endless are the possibilities for betterment, or so they have proven after conjuring a conquest against hopelessness and making things happen.
(October 2, 2005 issue)
Write letter to the editor. Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board. Click here. |
|
[return to top]
[home]
[network page]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
SUPERBALITA
WEEKEND
|
