Re-evaluating our values

By Emmanuelle

Doctors of the mind claim that our realities are stuff that dreams are made of. On the other hand, they also claim our dreams cross-over to the reality of our days.

Usually, the lingering waking effects of these dreams diminish to nothingness. Sometimes though, these escalate to the status of walking stalking nightmares.

Who among the Pangasinenses relish the nightmare of Kuya Joe’s fall from gloria? Flash us back, anytime, to shots of the sons and their clones during the cabalistic ritual of disenthronement, and worms in our skin crawl. The images are immortalized, on film and on print. And in the screen of our minds.

There is no other better proof of how low we have crawled. Of how beastly we have prowled.

And so, a retreat on values we must have. And to constantly remind us why we must, freeze the screen on those particularly infamous moments in our history.

Actually, it is never a question of lost values. It is more of re-examining, re-defining and re-instituting whatever goodness we always did have imbibed in the core of our beings. This is true the world over and since the beginning of time.

The Greeks who pioneered liberal education in the West, taught the values of courage and respect for authority and for human dignity mainly through the epics of Homer. And in the East, Confucius trained his students that to become good leaders, they must cultivate not only the right mind but also the right heart, for “the character of the ruler is like the wind, and that of the people, like grass. In whatever direction the wind blows, the grass will always bend.” The early Christians passed on the values of love and forgiveness through the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.  And our tribal ninuno taught old and tested values to the young ones not only through their native epics, but also through their legacy of songs, proverbs, riddles or bugtong.

Physicist-turned-social scientist Serafin Talisayon and many others like him, insist that a crisis of values lies underneath the enormous and complex problems of our present times (social, political and economic). In other words, our problem is fundamentally a moral one.

Therefore, to return to the process of rebuilding our future, the first thing to do is to re-evaluate our values because the national character, if read correctly, mirrors the long-term future of our nation.

This is not something that is entirely new to us. Talisayon writes that we, as a people, have gone though a concerted communal effort to re-evaluate values to re-build the future three times in our national life:

The first was triggered by the execution of Fathers Gomez, Burgos and Zamora in 1872 which led to the outbreak of the 1896 Philippine Revolution with prime movers Rizal, Bonifacio, Jacinto and Mabini. The values they re-awakened – courage, good example, freedom, kalamigan  ng loob, pagtitiis, pagpapahalaga sa kalinisan ng puri, katapatan, the golden rule.   

The second effort took place in 1970, at the outbreak of the First Quarter Storm, which led to the declaration of Martial Law. This effort failed because the leadership was regarded as corrupt and manipulative, thus economic imbalance became more pronounced, and divisions within the society widened.

The third effort was triggered by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983, from which emerged People Power to topple a twenty-year dictatorship.

                                     (to be concluded next week)

(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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