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"Hard As Flint" (Philippine Daily Inquirer)Juan L. MercadoLabel | features Who gags when saying “Merry Christmas”? Macbeth rasped that he choked after murdering Duncan, his king. “I had most need of blessing, and Amen / Stuck in my throat”. Does this greeting stick in the craws of Gen. Hermogenes Esperon and some officers when they address Edith Burgos and other mothers of desaparecidos? And tycoon Eduardo Cojuangco? Does he grit teeth when he mumbles, if ever, “Maligayang Pasko” to small farmers victimized by the coconut levy? The Marcoses yank ill-gotten wealth, parked with cronies, who’ve made it their ill-gotten wealth. Do Imelda, Imee and Bongbong choke on the Ilokano: “Naimbag a Pascua?” Does pardoned plunderer Joseph Estrada hail ex-cronies Jaime Dichavez, Atong Ang and Dante Tan, in Mandarin : “Sheng Tan Kuwai Lei?” Remember those 40-plus officials junketing in Spain ? When on Madrid ’s Gran Via, did they text home : “Feliz Navidad”? Does now freed rapist Romeo Jalosjos greet his victim “Malipayong Pasko”? Schmaltzy songs, Santa Claus, wrecked diets, etc don’t make Christmas. “The birth of Jesus is not some fairy tale meant to warm the heart. We measure time by this event, “ Oblate Father Ron Rolhieser writes.. It’s also about “a harsh, non-negotiable challenge to clean up our pampered self-centered lives and build some justice”. Christmas 2007 comes, as it did two millennia ago, to a “hard as flint” society. “There was oppression for those who were not friends of Tiberius Caesar,” noted the 1949 Wall Street Journal editorial, republished on every Christmas eve since. Looting, abuse, summary executions were rife. “There was everywhere contempt for human life…What was a man for but to serve Caesar?”. Our Ceasars, Herods, Scrooges, and praetorian guards today haven’t changed. Ask the often double-crossed Sumilao farmers. Then, and now, it’s the poor who bear the brunt. The richest ten percent of Filipinos consume 37 centavos out of every peso, the UN’s “Human Development Report” reveals. The poorest ten percent scrounge with two centavos. No one dies directly from starvation here. But “protein energy malnutrition ushers a bigger proportion of pre-school kids to early graves than in poorer Bangladesh or Kenya , World and Asian Development Bank found. And 463 of every 100,000 Filipinos suffer from TB – almost quadruple the Malaysian rate of 133. Malnutrition opens floodgates to debilitating diseases, including : blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency. It spawns a tragic cycle : ill-fed anemic mothers giving birth to shriveled children – who in turn will mother the next generation of dwarfed infants. A child always crouched below her desk during breaks., So, this Grade One teacher checked and found : “She didn’t want us to see her eat breakfast – green papaya, soaked in salt and vinegar, wrapped in a plastic bag.” This is starvation by daily installment. You bump into this vulnerable child everywhere. Christmastime,, some emerge as shabbily-clothed carolers. Others muster the “bottle-cap brigade”: grimy kids who, at street corners, whack tansan tambourines ” to cadge a peso or two. These gaunt “street troubadours” should be in school. But poverty forces 33 out of every 100 to drop out before reaching Grade 6. And they know, from experience, that this season nets them larger tips. “Christmas is the only time I know of when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely,” Charles Dickens wrote in 1843. But these chronically-hungry youngsters can barely read. Thus, few know of Dickens’ tale of Christmases past, present and yet to come. A thin crust of Scrooges, meanwhile, toss up leaders equally blind. “You were always a good man of business,” Scrooge told the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley. “Business?” wailed the Christmas Past wraith, shaking his chains. “Mankind was my business… mercy, forbearance, benevolence was all my business.” If we “open our shut-up hearts freely, we’ll discover they’re ‘hard as flint’, Jonathan Powers wrote in “Scrooge Is Here”. “No steel ever struck (from them ) generous fire. They remain secret, self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” We must give of our time, sweat, talent and, where possible, resources, to reach the needy. Otherwise, Christmas will elude our grasp. In our twilight years, the wife and I cherish the memory of our five then-small kids, breaking open their piggy banks on Christmas Eve.. They’d pour out their year’s savings into the crib, at the Nino’s feet. “For the poor’, they’d pray. The five have disappeared into adults now. But this memory resonates with the truth that mystic poet Angelus Silesius underscored :“Even if Christ should be born a thousand times over in Bethlehem , as long as he is not born in your heart…you shall have been born to no purpose.” God did not come into our hard-as-flint world as “some superstar whose earthly power, beauty, and muscle dwarf us”, we’re reminded. . He appeared as a “vulnerable, thoroughly under-whelming baby.” .”God entered human history,” the Latin American liberation theologian Leonardo Boff wrote.. “He made our lot his own.” This child is “Emmanuel”. God with us. And he is present in our frailities, pain, doubts, disappointments and joys. . And in the Child’s eyes, in the manager, we “see the humanity, the joyfulness and eternal youth of God.” Merry Christmas. . (referred to by Mar Patalinjug and added by Cheryl D. Tinonga) |
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