Sunday, October 21, 2007 Sun.star Essay: For fellowship By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
THERE'S no break from it---from the matter of FPV---fraternities (going wild), politics (going awry), vigilantes (going darker). In news heads, newsbreaks, radio drama leads, these topics are treated like blasting caps blowing up, (“there it goes!”). Between months or weeks, one or the other blows up, then “settles down,” just before the next blasts.
None of such recurring problems, like fraternities, has been solved in this side of the world. And people are probably getting used to “old” news of injuries and death in the city, the implications of a sad age in a sad city cracking its way into society’s consciousness, adversely affecting the development of children.
Fraternities probably started out at a time in the early days of education in North America or Canada when more and more boy students went to school far from home. They had to stay in dorms and tried to make homes away from their own homes. Thus, they broke into groups---competing, excelling.
It was a place where students looked for bright brothers who would love them.
Then years after, that love would push the brods to die for brods and kill non-brods. Or murder a near-brod in hazing.
The latest incident of death believed to be out of hazing happened to one Cris Anthony Mendez, a senior public administration student at UP in Diliman.
He was a student councilor representing his college in the UP Student Council.
He would look like the perfect example of a potential product of the original ideals of fraternities---community service and leadership qualities.
In the beginning, fraternities were almost transcendent. In fact, some initiations to the fraternity then (or up to now in the case of laudable organizations) were services given to the community, like visits to hospitals by applicants. One service mentioned applicants painting churches, for free, of course.
Of the process to let a potential member aspire, the pledge is a solemn promise to commit himself to support the worthy intent of the organization, the idea that gives it form. But later, the pledge would include the ability to be initiated also physically. Then a potential frat brod would undergo humiliation in front of friends or the public in a senseless ingress trial.
So came paddling, with a specific number of paddle blows for a neophyte. An applicant could have enough or too much of the blows. It could end as a joke to talk about once an applicant passes the “test” or a mauling no one is likely to forget, nor forgive, if ending in death.
There are frat members who are kind and there are those who are sadists. Initiation could last for a few weeks or months, or even a semester. The need to be part of a group seems to be such an ache in a frat applicant, it would stay even if the initiation takes an entire schoolyear.
But not just to talk of hazing, you also have the frat fights between fraternities, murders in the name of brotherhood, killings for the sake of a “Greek society” that pretends to speak of fellowship.
In 1991, Lenny Villa of the Ateneo de Manila University Law School died after a bloody hazing rite. On learning about the death of Mendez, Villa’s mother said, “Every time there’s a hazing victim, my heart bleeds in grief. I remember my son. It’s really lonely.”
And there have been others like Lenny and Cris.
How does anyone of these incidents hit a mother---she who is weak and wouldn’t pass a frat initiation?
You have a young man whose parents tried their best to put to college, now he’s lying in a coffin. The dream is gone, there’s no more talk of what he could have done, for the day and always. Now you can’t hear his voice, you can’t see the way he walked, or you can’t hear him talk.
And frat cases, if the police call it that, are not just a mother’s pain.
