Think about it
‘Defining moment’
By Jun Velasco
“For this God is our God forever and ever. He will be our guide even unto death,” Psalm 48:14
PANGASINAN is very much in the SAF headlines.
In case you have forgotten, two of the slain 44 commandos– PO2 Ephraim Garcia Mejia and PO2 Romeo Senin — in that tragic operation in Maguindanao were Pangasinenses.
Mejia was given appropriate honors Thursday at his hometown of San Nicolas led by Gov. Amado Espino Jr., and Congressmen Marlyn Agabas and Pol Bataoil, other local officials and kins. The necro rite in front of the San Nicolas building was ruled by tears and weeping.
Mejia’s family no doubt and loved ones were soaked in tears even amid heroic honors accorded by government officials.
Earlier, DILG Secretary Mar Roxas motored to San Nicolas to condole with the Mejias.
On Feb. 2, in a speech at Camp Bagong Diwa, Secretary Roxas appealed to the families of the fallen commandos to “use our tears to strengthen ourselves, use our sorrow and lamentation to make us stronger.”
The body of the other Pangasinense SAF commando Romeo Senin, a native of San Fabian, was brought to Iligan, in Mindanao, where his wife comes from.
You will notice that we are simply stating facts, stripped of mournful and maudlin emotionalism in deference to the nationwide mourning which seems to know no end.
Thrust in the vortex of the controversy are two stellar PNP officers, one Ilokano native and former Pangasinan provincial director Alan Purisima, suspended PNP director general who is being pinpointed as the man in command of the ill-fated operations, and C/Supt. Noli Talino, a former Dagupan City police chief, now acting SAF director, who replaced sacked Director Getulio Napenas who botched the job.
Supt. Chris Abrahano, Dagupan’s police chief, describes the death of the famous 44 commandos “a defining moment” for the Philippine National Police.
In the same breath, this glorious moment of the PNP, says Supt. Reynaldo Biay, should signal a much stronger police organization as protector of the Filipino people and nemesis of criminals.
“They (the ill-fated 44 commandos) knew how to die, ” said Abrahano.
Was the carnage the worst that happened in the police organization?
No says, our friend, Arthur Narvaez, 57, Guardians national president, who says it’s a rung lower to the ambush in October 1977 at Daang Patikol in Jolo, Sulo which resulted in the death of some 140 people was “much more worse.”
Narvaez is pessimistic about the future of the Bangsamoro Law as a result of the tragedy. Art is asking our lawmakers to re-think their assumptions before biting the Bangsamoro law option.
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Below is a graduation address delivered by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen in an American university, where she was awarded an Honorary Ph. D. Read it if you want to get the best out of life.
“I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.
People won’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter’s night, or when you’re sad or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve received your test results and they’re not so good.
Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.
You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here’s what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a magic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about these things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she cries to pick up a sweet with the thumb and first finger.
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.
But it is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kid’s eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.
I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that in part by telling other what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.”
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