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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Obenieta: Damning the dire
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
IT’s no less frustrating than Captain Ahab’s obsession to catch the great white whale - turning the tide against the dark forces of evil. True, superheroes are more spectacular when we plunge ourselves headlong into their heroism between the pages of a comic book or at the silver screen.
In the real world where villainy often makes a splash, those who swim against the current almost always end up flailing in the pool of their own blood. Against the few who dare to unfurl the sails of idealism, the bad might as well be jeering: “Go fish!”
In the nick of the Holy Week just past, naked wickedness flaunted itself in the face of those killing time for a pious reflection or two true to the spirit of the season. It was a rude reality check for a society lulling itself with notions of its Christianity and civilized conduct. Uncanny, indeed, how one unidentified assassin (and the cabal who hired him) can disarm us into deducing the Bible and comic books are not meant for reading back to back. Dousing cold water to fire in the belly of the impressionable is the suspicion of the police and colleagues thus: “The attack on Elpidio “Jojo” dela Victoria Jr., director of the Cebu City Bantay Dagat Commission and concurrent market administrator, may have something to do with his role in the campaign to save the Visayan seas.”
According to environmentalist lawyer Antonio Oposa, he and dela Victoria have received death threats following the campaign to ban commercial fishing operators from the Visayan seas. “Before the unidentified assailant shot him three times, dela Victoria had revealed in an interview that some commercial fishermen whose business have been affected by the ban have pooled P1 million to have him and Oposa killed.”
Those spreading the gospel of virtue and the courage of one’s convictions might as well have fishbone stuck in their throats. Yes, especially when such concepts as decency and the sacredness of a single life leave a froth of seawater in the mouth while the culture of death brews up a cauldron of cold-blooded revenge and vigilantism. To each his own ethics, sigh. Swallowing the moral lessons out of the lives and deaths of martyrs and heroes - hook, line and sinker - is all it takes to feel like fish out of water. Then again, only the shallow could fancy rocking the boat of badness would be as breezy as cruise on a yacht. Staring at the eye of the storm, after all, is all it entails to call the bluff of its wrath.
Such is the stuff of conquest that comic books or celluloid magic can only gloss over, as when one of the priests featured in the Siete Palabras at the Cebu Metropolitan Cathedral last Good Friday extolled the example of dela Victoria (an active parish lay worker who presided a feeding program for indigents in his community.)
“I shall not die of a cold,” declared the novelist Willa Cather. “I shall die of having lived.” Such depth of daring sounds quaint in a time when cynicism resonates like an aria, when little deaths become a coda after wallowing in the surface of living conveniently. So long, Mr. dela Victoria.
(yomyko@yahoo.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 18, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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