De Quiros' Column

There's The Rub : Legacies

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

(Conclusion)

EVEN in my youth, despite yielding for the most part to small-town blues, I've tried to do things differently, even if it risked derision. To this day, it is a source of ironic pleasure for my high school classmates to recall that I have the dubious distinction of being the only one from Ateneo de Naga to have lost the intra-Bicol essay contest. Indeed, not just to have lost it but to have lost it big-time. I decided to write creatively about an uncreative topic (I do not even recall now what it was) remembering that the humorist Robert Benchley wrote his college thesis in Economics on fisheries from the point of view of the fish. I suffered the same fate. Benchley flunked; I finished last in the contest.

But it's that drive to experiment -- call it daring or call it recklessness -- that drew me to activism in the first place, like moth to a flame. Not everybody rushed into its embrace at that time, which suggests that luck is often made, accidents are inevitabilities waiting to happen. You thrust yourself into the world as much as get thrust into it. It's a matter of discovering the familiar, or recognizing the strange. I don't know how else to put it.

So you ask me: Would I have supported my wife and daughter if they were fighting for the women's vote?

Well, I suppose if they were fighting for the women's vote, they would scarcely need my support, or ask for it. They would probably be women of strong character whose support I would be glad to have in my times of adversity. Quite incidentally, less than hypothetically, my wife and two kids, a girl and a boy, were all born under the sign of the Dragon while I was born under the sign of the Rabbit. I can assure you I've known dragon's breath to singe the fur on my back.

I don't know that any hypothetical answer to your hypothetical question would really go beyond platitude. I think I'll do better answering a very real question in the here and now, which is: What are you doing to help your kids at least, girl or boy, if not your lover, woman or man, get a crack at a better future?

My answer follows from what I've narrated above.

First off, I am trying, these days almost desperately, to leave them a better world.

We are the product of our time and place. We are weighed down, or buoyed up, by the values, attitudes, and convictions or biases of our time and place. I figure I'd try to leave them one with fewer biases than I got. I may not be able to change the world for them, but I'd like to think, or hope, I may be able, along with kindred spirits of my time and place, to create the space, or refuge, or sanctuary for them to let their dreams run wild, the way activism did for me. Who knows? Maybe not just run wild but come true. Winners in competitions often say they would not have been able to look at the world from their dizzying heights if they had not stood on the shoulders of giants.

That is what I want to do for my kids: help them stand on the shoulders of giants.

There is a complement to this, or indeed a more important undertaking. It is that I am trying, these days much more hopefully, to help the next generation think for itself. I want to develop in them the capacity to question their world and themselves, to rebel against fixation and tyranny -- even if they are my own.

Not the least of the reasons for this is that there are limits to the kind of world we can leave the kids. Ultimately, the best treasure we can give them is not the abundance of worldly goods, it is the hunger for knowledge. The best security we can give them is not an answering machine, it is a questioning mind. We affirm this implicitly when we strive to give our kids the best education they can get. That is far better than all the money we can put in their bank deposits, particularly if that money comes from the "jueteng" illegal lottery, or all the insurance we can buy, particularly if that insurance comes from the pre-need firm College Assurance Plan. Leaving the kids with a good mind, apart from a good name, is the most precious legacy we can bequeath.

But there is an even bigger reason why I want my kids to develop a capacity to think for themselves. It is not just to equip them to defend themselves from the world, it is also to equip them to defend themselves from me. Or at least from my generation. I go back to the proposition I made at the beginning, which is that the hardest enemy to fight is oneself. The hardest enemy to see is oneself. It's a truism, but it's true: The rebels of yesterday are the tyrants of today.

Some very literally so. Nothing for me constitutes a bigger irony than that the same activism that taught us to question everything under the sun also demanded that we never question the cause we were espousing. Or indeed the methods it employed. To do so was to be called a revisionist, not unlike being called heretic by the Church, and suffer the same fate. That is being burned at the stake. The "killing fields" are a testament to how backward those who demand that the world move forward can become, advancing only the cause of the Holy Inquisition.

I want my kids to be able to think for themselves, to say no to what is wrong -- even from me. That is not as easy as it sounds. To prove that, and as a parting shot, let me throw back your question at you. I won't ask you if you would rally behind your wife and daughter if they were fighting for the women's vote. That is easy. I will ask you instead: "If your kids were fighting for priests to have the right to marry, would you rally behind them?" "If your kids were fighting for gays, women and men, to have the right to marry, would you rally behind them?" "If your kids were fighting to have marijuana declared legal, would you rally behind them?"

Who knows? Maybe if I'm doing the right thing today, one of my grandchildren will be standing here 68 years from now to answer those questions.