Friday, October 20, 2006 Malilong: Guanzon and pessimism By Frank Malilong Jr. The Other Side
TWO farmers were jailed for playing “hantak.” The police thought that the experience taught the duo never to gamble again until they saw them inside their cell betting on whose morsel would attract the first fly.
Architect Manuel Guanzon and former senator John Osmeña are not inveterate gamblers like the farmers in the story and I don’t expect them to land in jail for illegal gambling. But the farmers at least had fun, unhindered by the weight of personal pride.
Guanzon started it first. Pissed off by constant heckling from pessimists, he dangled a P500 thousand wager that work on the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) would be completed by Nov. 15. Unable to find any takers, he upped the ante to P1.5 million, which Osmeña called, subject to certain conditions.
Now, the not-so-funny has turned ridiculous. Here we are, on the threshold of achieving something even the next generations of Cebuanos could be proud of, locked in acrimonious debate on whether it can or cannot be done when the sane thing to do would have been to embrace one another as one community unified in mission and purpose.
In fairness to all, the heckling and the doubting have their use, too, not the least of which is that they keep the people in charge awake and on their toes always. Criticism is in a sense a measure of vigilance. The more willingly you accept this, the easier it is to keep your cool. Here is where I think Guanzon missed a step when he dared critics to put their money where their mouth is.
It is, of course, easy to say how wonderful the grace of patience and tolerance is, if you are not the one inside the pressure cooker. He is the one working his butt off 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Why can’t the others just leave him alone?
If it’s any consolation to Guanzon and his principals, pessimism is not a modern day invention. Neither are the illusion that personal gain is made up of crushing others; the tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected; refusing to set aside trivial preferences; and attempting to compel others to live and believe as we do.
In fact, all the above were already well-recognized and were written about twenty hundred years ago by Marcus Tullius Cicero, the young Roman who chose a career in law to advance his status and who subsequently became Rome’s “greatest orator and most articulate philosopher.”
I came across Cicero’s enumeration of man’s mistakes while reading an essay on “Triumph.” His treatise was obviously based on his observation of the human character in Republican Rome. It is amazing how little that character has changed over the centuries.
“I wonder how many of Cicero’s contemporaries could foresee telephones, fax machines, computers, remote controls, walking on the moon and so many of the things we take for granted today,” said the author of “Triumph.” A good motto is “No one knows enough to be a pessimist.” What we can’t fathom today will be the accepted reality two thousand years hence, he said.
