OF DREAMS AND DESTINIES
By Wilhelmina S. Orozco
Why do we suffer from the same problems all the time: poverty, violence, and apathy to what is going on around us?
I think that these problems stem from our lack of will power or inherent weakness of our will power to solve our problems now. By now I mean with greater resolve to solve them today and everyday.
Now why do we lack that will power? Actually so many factors are impinging on our minds, affecting our hearts and behavior, which weaken, slow down, and even deaden our minds all the time. These are brought about by institutional, environmental and violent forces in our country.
As we know, will power is that capacity to volunteer, to act on our life, the realities around us with great decisiveness. But we are not given the opportunity to that all the time. Instead we are made to kowtow, to use other people, to depend on others in order to get what we want, to get the necessary changes that we need in our lives.
There is so much power-wielding in our society that the people lose that inertia, to initiate changes themselves. Power-wielders either have political or economic clout.
What are the examples of these?
Hence the so-called people power is being weakened by these power-wielders and thus has become a relic of our past.
Thus the minds of our people are slowly being attuned to the idea that initiating changes, making moves to rise above the current realities is a losing proposition, “suntok sa buwan” or a product of the imagination not worthy of being pursued at all. People begin to think that corrupt or evil ways are “normal” occurrences and that they form part of life.
People who occupy high places in society, although crooked in their ways, are called “maabilidad,” or “wa-is,” or “pana-panahon lang yan,” meaning each one, whether good or evil will have their own chance in being victorious in whatever manner. In other words, the people have gotten so used to corrupt ways that they now view them as part of living in our society.
So much losses have occurred already in our society – lives, our natural resources, and our greatest resource – the intellectual products put out by inventors, authors, and all creative people.
Lives have been lost due to gangsterism, literally and figuratively. Gang violence is rampant causing the loss of human lives. Political gangsterism has made installing “fake officials” official. Drug taking has created a toll on the minds of the young people, making them lose their directions in life.
Our natural resources are being depleted with nary any benefit to our people. We are losing our trees as a consequence of which floods occur that cause in turn loss of lives and properties. Our air is polluted causing illnesses which our people cannot even afford to cure by themselves. Our seas, which are great sources of marine life, are not well-taken care of. Other nations are even entering our archipelagic boundaries depleting our marine resources for their own gains.
On the other hand, the creative outputs of our people – literary, artistic, philosophical, technological-- are not being given immediate and strong attention. What about the intellectual writings? We seem to lack philosophical writings that will address our status as a people, writings that will point to us the way to living a fulfilled life. Instead we have pragmatic discourses, all devoted to analyzing and proffering solutions to problems which occur and recur all the time. How many Filipino inventions have been sold abroad thus benefiting other people instead of ours? Can’t we have the minds of Steve Jobs and bring about technological innovations ourselves? Our literary output are read by writers themselves, not by the ordinary folks. (I have been thinking, the Ani Journal should be put out, after being produced as a journal, as segregated sections printed in newsprint to make them accessible to the people at a cheap price. The CCP has to make its output available at popular prices and not be a counterpart of the MOMA in NYCor the Louvre Museum in Paris, France the products of which are affordable to the rich tourists.)
Actually, we need philosophy in life; we need to philosophize in order to make us abstract lessons from what is occurring in our daily lives. We should not even be afraid to philosophize, to look at our lives from a distance.
Right now, many religious and spiritual beliefs are competing for the attention of the people. Many use the various books to give an explanation to what is occurring in our midst. Actually all these beliefs give the people hope. Not one is teaching how to be a nihilist or someone destructive of one’s own life. (Unfortunately, those committing suicides have not heard or refuse to listen to them, which is a sad thing, really.) Instead they promise everlasting life, an enlightened life, nirvana or problem-free life, and many more. The most important thought in learning these beliefs is how to connect them to our realities and give justification for us to seek our dreams and destinies.
Hence, for those who are into advocacies, we need to rethink how to alter the minds of the people, how to make them conquer such thoughts, how to make them hold themselves up as a people whose destinies and dreams must be respected and allowed to be fulfilled. How do we do that?
First of all, the people must erase in their minds that other people should think for them. It is good to refer, confer, and seek advice from other people but ultimately it is they who should make the decisions. This means removing patriarchal mindsets that uphold power for power’s sake.
Secondly, the existence of certain institutions that foster obeisance or strengthen images of authoritarians must be challenged. Who are these authorities, by what right do they wield power – is it legitimate or il? Who held them up as authorities – by tradition, or by democratic choice? Are their powers directed to the good life of the people, or their own, and their families and relatives?
Thirdly, what are the methods, the ways by which we ourselves can influence the people so that they will take up the cudgels for their own destinies, make decisions major and minor as to where their lives will be leading to?
The mind of the people must be attuned to their own dreams and destinies. We must take care of their minds because otherwise they would be slaves forever to the forces who seek a hold on them and maintain their dominant positions forever, for good or ill.
Dreams and destinies are inherent in and are the rights of every individual. Those who deny others of these are being cruel; in fact those who kill people have already killed their right to take hold of their own lives.
Dreams contain our wishes of what we want to become, what we want to be in life. They provide us that impetus to go on living so that we may attain them. Once a person stops dreaming then he or she is a slave to the material life already. But so long as everyone dreams – wishing for attaining something that will fulfill their talents and skills and be of service in turn to the majority of the people – then they are living healthy lives.
Now destiny is that point where the individual has already done everything to be what he or she is, meaning to say, that is the summum bonum or that peak in one’s life whereby one can already say “I have attained it.”
Jose Rizal, our national hero attained the peak of his life, his dream of awakening the people through his writings, the Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo. It was his destiny to reveal to the world how the Filipino people lived under that period and so directed our history as a people to a life of independence. In the same way, when Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quijote de la Mancha, he also was saying something about the Spanish period in the 16th century. He was asking the readers to question the aristocracy and knighthood for their rational contributions to society. So also did Dostoyevsky write his novels, Crime and Punishment in Russia, in order to expose his society. Harriet Tubbman in the 18th century also wrote about slavery in the United States in order to expose it as inhuman and to make the government ban it forever.
Each of the authors above rose above their plain lives in order to create a dent on then hearts and minds of the people. They fulfilled their destinies maybe even without their meaning to, and so look at those societies and ours now.
Ninoy and Cory Cojuangco Aquino have already written their lives. Ninoy’s destiny was ended abruptly and thus was not able to see the obliteration of dictatorship in our country. Cory had the same vision of Ninoy and so was able to carry it out to fruition. However, side by side with her vision were the various collectives of people who had also a vision of where to go and how to attain it – by action together in unison to remove all vestiges of one-man military rule.
Unfortunately, our destiny to recover from that nightmarish period was cut short by the series of administrations which deflected the minds of the people from their own destinies. Here we see how certain individuals can do harm to the attainment of the people’s destiny.
So under PNoy, we need to be vigilant and see what he can do – as he said in his earliest speeches – “Puwede na tayong mangarap muli.” Six years is his term. And let us see what he can do to help shape the people’s destiny.
