Sunday, October 22, 2006 Sunstar essay: A neighborly thing By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
You get all kinds of neighbors—the noisy one who never stops talking, the quiet one who never stops sulking in a personal cold war.
Culture, somehow, has something to do with it. A neighbor goes into deep sleep with music from the radio blasting, but not another who could die in a week’s sleepless nights.
Even just the difference in the tone of the same dialect, the beat, the rhythm, could interest or bother a neighbor.
Things could even go worse, with incidents often times ending up in the papers of neighbors stabbing each other after drinking sprees. Or one woman charged with gossiping before a barangay official.
You could like a neighbor and be a buddy, but for how long will it work? Or you could end up wishing you could move out of the area, if you had a way.
But company, in other times, is also a treasure, there’s nothing like it. And it needs nourishing, some things to do to deserve it.
Today, you can’t imagine yourself living without neighbors. The isolation of villages (near the forest or among boulders in the cave man days) is a thing of the past. The small villages connected with each other soon enough, to feel safe from wild animals or to lift the spirit on a rainy day. The village groups expanded in due time, people bonding a little bit more, sharing outlook, planning together as the world grew smaller. And the United Nations was born.
But it’s not always a happy ending. Other smaller groups of nations were formed, like the Seato, which disbanded too soon.
It’s because there are the complexities of relatedness. Take even just one problem—the border disputes. There comes a fight for space and property, power, too, and, later, there’s a war.
And yes, there are some parts of the world that are contentious but it goes with the territory.
Journalist and author Milton Viorst, in his book Sandcastles, goes back in the Middle East history, how at one time the Ottoman Turks conquered most of the Arab nations and Southeastern Europe. The conquest was one big slap across the lands of neighbor countries. Near the empire’s collapse in 1918, some of the vanquished nations took heart and fought for freedom, like the Greeks and the Serbs. But not the Arabs.
There seemed hardly any true resolve for them to be let go. The identity they had with the empire was the Islamic belief but this commonality is never enough. There are racial, territorial and ethnic concerns, even trade problems, also the hitches and the disputes that good intentions or religion alone can’t solve.
When the empire fell, the Europeans had taken hold of the lands or governance. The Arab nations somehow became modern colonies of Europe. Although now they mostly have their own mandates in an era of self-development, the nations never got too friendly with each other.
When the Asean summit happens here, there will be the neighbors a-visiting. And the summit officials will take up regional concerns, try and pass the test of sincerity and willingness to help. There will be difficulties ahead but the international group seems hopeful about the future.
After 39 years of existence, the Asean is doing its best in improving peace and governance in the region. The birth of the organization is an inspiration behind the thought of neighbors coming together to help each other in the many aspects of growth. It’s more realistic than if they depended on partners from the other side of the world.
Strong on the belief of what arbitration can do to solve conflicts, the Asean started when previous smaller-than-the-UN failed.
The Asean had the sincere intent of healing three disputants in the region at that time—the Philippines, Malaysia (over Sabah) and Indonesia, with Thailand offering the venue for the first talk about it. The first formal meeting of the Asean was in Thailand in 1967 attended by its original members: Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
As for the Middle East, author Viorst, who is a New Yorker journalist and one Jewish American fascinated by the Arab culture, dedicates his book “to the children of the Middle East who deserve peace.”
