A Time to Cry

After watching star witness Jun Lozada at his various encounters with administration officials, I won’t be surprised if some trying-to-be-cute critic calls him “iyaking Intsik.” During the Harapan program, some of his opponents did accuse him of putting up a clever act whenever  he looks pained and teary-eyed.

To be fair, he does wonder aloud why he seems to be crying more easily and more often than he has ever done.

In one brief conversation, he said that he feels like he is mourning the passing of his old life, now that he has made an irreversible decision to walk into a future that he hasn’t planned nor imagined.

That idea resonated with me, though in a slightly different way. A Christian activist in the 1970s whom I admired a lot, Boy Ipong, used to quote the biblical text – “the old man must die so that the new man may live,” applying it to the needed transformation not just of middle class activists but even of the farmer-leaders. “We still need to kill the landlord inside us,” he said, “even among us who fight for a just distribution of land.”

I wonder if Jun Lozada’s tears may not also be mourning the dying of his old self, a necessary dying so that his new self may live. 

Being only human, as he repeatedly confesses, it must be exhilarating to experience anxiety and fear before he made his fateful decision, and then receive public admiration, even adulation.

But I don’t think that the previous life he willed himself to give up was that meaningless or even shameful to him. Even though he denounces the dysfunctional system within which he had to operate, we can sense that he enjoyed the challenge of finding solutions acceptable to his principals, within the permissible parameters of his conscience, then.

He may be ready to give all that up, accepting it as a consequence of his choices, but it does not mean that he would not feel any regrets, even a sense of loss.

I am writing this in an internet facility at the Medical Mission Group hospital in Lucena City.  A few hours ago, I held my mother’s hands for an hour and engaged her in constant conversation while Dr. Oabel performed a “debridement” on her gangrenous right foot. His surgical scissors cut away the dead flesh, including all her blackened toes, without any anesthesia. My mother winced only a couple of times, but said she could bear the pain.

I felt some welling of tears through the process, marvelling at my mother’s strength, yet worrying how she would take the loss of her toes when she finds out. I knew that the dead parts had to go, to avoid the danger of further gangrene and eventual blood poisoning. But the tears were also of relief and gratitude that we have been given some reason to hope. The doctor explained that unless the dead tissues are removed, the healthy tissues cannot regenerate and take the place of what was beyond rescue.

Early morning I will take the bus to Quezon City, pick up the bags that Girlie had packed for me, and fly to Phnom Penh. I will work with a German colleague on a feasibility study of promoting adult education in Cambodia and Laos.

The last time I was in Phnom Penh, I visited the “museum of the skulls,” part of the terrible consequences of the Khmer Rouge leaders’ project of building a new society from the scratch –  the presumed purity of the peasants, and eliminating the iredeemable intelligentsia.

If we take their ideas at face value,  we can cite them as evidence of the maxim: “Corruptio optimi pessima.” The worst corruption is that of the best.

If I had a choice, I would rather not leave the Philippines just now.

It is not only because I want to be with my mother as her healthy tissues struggle to grow and replace the dead ones that the doctor had cut. It is also because there’s a growing sense (even hope, yes despite repeated disappointments) that our country may be on the cusp of change.

In the excitement of planning and imagining a future we deserve, there are cautionary lessons from Phnom Penh: We cannot start from the scratch. But equally instructive are lessons from our own experience: We cannot have the same people doing the same things, and expect different or better results.

In many different ways, we have to accept letting some things go, even if it makes us cry.

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