The search for roots and justice

This being graduation season, thousands upon thousands of our very young will finish high school and college. For so many of them, their eyes are focused on working abroad for there is very little chance of their getting good paying jobs here.

The youth — about half of our present population — are to repeat that tired old cliché, the hope of the nation. This new generation is altogether savvy with the new information technologies and tools, and with trends in the United States.

They speak a new language in keeping with the rapid technological developments. But many of them still seek the old and popular profession of law as the best shortcut to power and prestige. They do not consider the humanities as a priority in their education. I do not envy them. Though they are college graduates, there is not enough depth to their knowledge, which we in the much older generation possess.

For us then, grade school was the whole day and up to grade seven. It is incredible to me that some college graduates I have encountered cannot even write a correct English sentence when it should be obvious to them that English continues to be the language of government, business, culture and international communication. What then will we tell these new graduates?

I was commencement speaker at two special high schools last week. Bibsy Carballo invited me to address the graduates of St. John’s Academy in San Juan of which she is president, and the poet Vim Nadera invited me to the Philippine High School for the Arts in Makiling of which he is director. I gave the same address in both institutions, but in Makiling, because of the nature of the school, I emphasized cultural creativity.

This is what I said:

I am a storyteller so let me tell you about a boy who was born in a village whose people were tenants — landless agricultural workers. At a very early age, he learned the chores of the farm, how to plow, the backbreaking planting and harvesting of rice.

As with all tenants, he was familiar with the hunger that loomed over the village during the planting season when the first rice harvest is yet to come. He foraged the fields when they were fallow and when they were green with growing rice for snails, frogs, fish and edible weeds. His pleasures were few: swimming in the creeks and irrigation ditches, racing the carabaos. How he loved the scent of newly cut rice stalks!

When he learned how to read, a vast new world opened up for him; he perused everything with the printed word, the old newspapers used to wrap dried fish in the market, the tattered vernacular magazine that passed from house to house. He was transported by these books and newspapers to far-flung and exotic geographies. He often played truant in the railroad station to watch the trains come clanging in, and in the highway beyond the village to see the cars speed on to their destinations. His world was different, so far removed from what he read. Even at that age, too, he already understood how it was to be poor, to suffer the lash from rapacious landlords.

Somehow, he managed to go on to high school and to college where he supported himself with odd and menial jobs. He met a girl beyond his station, fell in love with her and was very surprised and thankful when she accepted him.

He labored and persevered in his chosen profession, and there were times when he stayed in fabulous hotels and mansions, and dined sumptuously with the high and the mighty. But wherever distant niche he reached, his thoughts always meandered back to that forsaken village — its fatalism and destitution.

On occasion, he visited it and bonded again with it. Now all his peasant friends are dead — they whose aspirations he had voiced. He sought justice for them but that search has not been fulfilled, so he will continue searching and searching to the very end of his days. Deep within him, he knew he had left his village forever.

That boy is now tired, decrepit and old — and perhaps you already guessed who he is — it is I, retelling my past in the hope that you who are so young and eager will always remember where you came from.

Forgive me; my story is egoistic and self-serving. I had meant to impress upon you the necessity of nurturing your roots for it is these which give you identity, indelible and permanent. It will also give you nationality. I also want to impress upon you the imperative of transcending identity and the careers you elect for yourselves. Latch on to an ideal, a purpose that embraces not just yourself, or your kith and kin, but your people for you will now be working for all of them. In this way, you give a larger meaning to your work and most of all to your life. This purpose — you may never achieve it, in the same way that I have yet to achieve it, but we must keep trying to fulfill our humanity.

There is so much the young can do because you are not yet encumbered by domestic responsibilities or hobbled by the infirmities of aging. Look around you, in your neighborhood, and beyond, in our cities and our villages and you will see the rampant injustice committed not so much by our very rich but by us when we disregard the rights of others. When we are selfish and act only for ourselves.

Is this what life means, the divine decree?

Those ancient Greeks asked such questions long before our time, and their most famous philosopher, Socrates, preached that man’s fulfillment depended on his living with virtue and excellence — two inseparable qualities. A person can become excellent in what he does but does not achieve manhood if he is not virtuous. Likewise, if he is virtuous but not excellent.

We know the distinction between right and wrong. Our conscience, our faith etched this firm, straight line.

But the implacable reality is this huge gray area between right and wrong and it is in this gray area where most of us live, where we make compromises and justify our naked hypocrisies.

It is then that we realize we cannot be self righteous, that we must be Christian or whatever faith we believe in. We learn compassion.

We have so much to do. We must realize we are a fractured people — we have all the institutions of a state but I do not think that we are a nation. Those of us who are cultural workers can do so much to mold this nation, but only if, as cultural workers, we have memory. Marx said it is the economy that dictates cultural growth; I say otherwise, it is culture that dictates economic growth and direction.

Culture unites us as a people. It is us who will build the classics, the enduring monuments of the future by being contextual, by utilizing our folk traditions in what we create.

For the Makiling graduates, I emphasized that art is much more than just entertainment; it ennobles human beings particularly if the artist identifies himself with his people in their search for that most precious element in life, which is justice.

I have two fond wishes for you that when you break away from Makiling, you’ll soar to become great Filipino artists. I emphasize Filipino.

And knowing only too well that the rewards for cultural excellence are meager. I hope you will all get rich.