De Quiros' Column

There's The Rub : Seasons

Conrado de Quiros dequiros@info.com.ph
Inquirer News Service

SOMEONE told me, some time ago, he was fed up with politics he had stopped minding it. He was not without a sense of outrage over what was happening to the country but he was filled as well with a sense of helplessness and resignation. Media, he said, weren't making things better. They were feeding on political scandal the way sharks fed on blood, churning out blithe observations rather than studious scrutiny. Such was his dismay, or disgust, he ignored the news altogether, preferring to read or watch other things on TV.

I am not completely unsympathetic to him. I do feel that way too, now and then, being assailed by politics, being drowned by news about politics, being up to my neck with the antics of politicians, particularly one Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA), one Fidel V. Ramos (FVR), one Jose de Venecia (JDV), and one horde of monkeys masquerading as congressmen. One imagines that the air, the literal one and the one occupied by TV and radio, would be cleaner without the noises they emit. Silence is preferable to gibberish.

I find the need to look for a breather too, and I greatly mind it when I am listening to live music while drinking my favorite poison, and someone forces his way to my table and insists on talking about politics. Being polite, I do not tell him to bugger off. I do not want to risk an attack of gout just to listen to him. I prefer sweet music and even sweeter musicians. But I make my inattentiveness patently known. Unfortunately, the more ferocious political animals have no instincts to detect this, but that is another story.

I am not completely unsympathetic to my friend's plight, but neither am I completely sympathetic to him. I've heard his sentiments expressed by others, some of them proclaiming with much disdain their utter distaste for politics. "I know nothing about politics," some even say with pride. Never have I seen ignorance admitted with such haughtiness. What can I say? That's the kind of indifference that allows tyranny to thrive. That's the kind of tiredness that allows GMA to prosper.

Who wants to have to talk or stalk politics if they can help it? Who wants to listen to the wailing of the hyenas on TV when they can watch Solar Sports instead? Who wants to get into arguments with people like Ronaldo Puno and Raul Gonzalez (who should be thankful they have not been hit by thunderbolts for mouthing the words "law" and "morality") when they can have more pleasant conversations with friends, real or imagined, and lovers, legitimate or illegitimate? Indeed, who wants to suffer the inconvenience, or even danger, of having to brave the heat and smell of sweaty bodies to protest the usurpation of Malacañang by an illegitimate President when they can have the luxury or bliss of an air-conditioned room, drowning themselves in the heat and smell of a sweaty body while surrendering to the usurpations of love?

No one wants to if she or he can help it. But that is exactly the problem: Neither you nor I can help it.

I can't help it, first off, because I am a parent. I can't help it because as a parent I am compelled by a force more powerful than the Constitution, which is the power of instinct, the instinct even of animals to protect their young, to give my kids a better world, or one at least that will not prey upon them. I do not want them to go through the same ordeal my generation did just to be able to free this country from a yoke.

I still remember what my mother used to tell me each time I told her not to worry when I went away with toothbrush, an extra T-shirt and books in hand and did not come home for a day or so. This was shortly before martial law, when I would spend the night in clandestine places. Of course, she had to worry, she said, she was a parent. Wait till I became a parent, she said.

In my case, it was a little easier because my father was already dead. He died way back when I was in second year high school, and I was helping put bread on our table by writing for a national magazine in my last year in college. I could always excuse my disappearances as running after a story. My friends had to sneak out and have violent confrontations with their fathers afterward. Some were told to exile themselves permanently, which, of course, was never meant; some were even reported by the parents to the authorities, like drug addicts to be "rehabbed."

My mother's words ring in my ears today like an LSS, or last song syndrome. If you're a parent, you would know what it means for your 16-year-old to not be home at 10 p.m. on a weekday in these perilous times. One is tempted to say that at least today the kids have cell phones. But if you're a parent, you would also know that, for a reason that is not always explainable by alien abduction, your kid's cell phone always seems to develop low batt at those ungodly hours, which makes him incommunicado. Looking back, I wonder how our parents managed to cope with that scale of worry at the time. I know I'll probably get a heart attack if I had to worry every time about my kid inhabiting a place that could be raided anytime.

I was an activist then, but I seriously doubt that many activists then would want their kids now to face the same dangers they did. Particularly those who went underground or to the hills, and more particularly those who were caught and tortured, or who saw friend and kin in the morgue or in the battlefield with half their faces blown off. You fight in your time to earn a measure of peace for the next generation. I fight even at this time to earn a measure of peace for my kids.

We do not stop the tyranny now and our kids will have to do it for us. I do not stop this monstrosity now and my kids will have to do it for me.