audacity

"...She grabbed the brush out of his hand, went for the blue, and within a minute had the sky on the canvas. The spell had been broken."

- what Lady Orpen did when she saw her neighbor, Winston Churchill, frozen before his canvas

"We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint box. And, for this, Audacity is the ticket."

- Churchill, Painting as a Pastime

Become individuals

Below is the full text of the Valedictory speech of April Lacson, Magna Cum Laude, UA&P batch 2006 who graduated this month from a five year course, graduating already with a masters degree. The sonnet is not included in Ms. Lacson's speech but another UA&P graduate quoted it as it reminded her of one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

Ladies and Gentlemen, Honored Guests, Fellow Students:

I am not graduating today and neither are you. My graduation came the day

I was told that I could finally bind my thesis after 51 revisions. There were no cheers or claps that day. There were no witnesses. Only a quiet sense of fulfillment and a voice within me that said it was done and I had done it. That was my graduation. When was yours?

It could be the day you took your last exam, the moment you typed that final period in a term paper or the day you saw a "P" beside your student number in the compre results. Whatever or whenever it was, that was your graduation. Not this. And not today.

During graduation practice we were told that this was a show. And, it is. For today, all the pomp and ceremony only serves to show that the world has finally recognized what you knew and earned long ago. Today, we receive one of the most expensive pieces of paper we will ever buy. Valuable not only because we've spent almost half a million on tuition fees, books, and allowance, but more importantly, because we've given four or five years of our lives to get it. Years we will never get back.

Now, having finished one goal, what comes next?

If you've been keeping apace with the news then you'd know that in the last few days, 5800 people were killed in an earthquake in Indonesia while another 20 lives were lost in the civil unrest in East Timor . But just as graduation is a part of school, death is a part of life. The real tragedy is not that they died but that it took their dying to give their lives significance. So I ask again: having finished one goal, what comes next? Will you allow your life to end the same way? Will you be contented to spend the rest of your life in mediocre existence? In living death?

I don't mean to dampen your spirits. In any case, I don't think that's possible - at least not today. But when your head is in the clouds, it's best to make sure that your feet are still firmly planted on earth.

Today marks the end of more than 10 years of formal education. Today, we reach the crossroads. We are as barks in the water. Ships which, having left one port, are in the middle of the ocean. Destination: uncertain. We are the captains and the crew awaits. Where do you want to go?

In the midst of your drunken raves, shopping sprees or bar hopping binges, have you stopped to ask yourself: why am I here? Or, while in the middle of cracking a joke between colleagues, paused to wonder if there is more to life?

Textbook answers won't do. Nor would replies mimicked from celebrities or quoted from your peers. You must answer. Not your family or your friends. YOU. Because however much society might nag and wail, life is personal and it is best lived according to your choices and your values.

So, if you haven't yet, ask yourself now. There are no wrong answers except one: settling, when you allow your life to be less than what you have imagined or wished it to be. When, having reached one goal, you stop, contented. When, in any endeavor, you hold back, and stand aside satisfied.

The history of mankind is the history of individuals. Just as we forget the armies, but treasure the generals that lead them, society forgets those who follow and remembers those who dare to shape the world according to their own vision

Do you wonder why the Philippines is struggling or why, after millions of dollars in aid and development efforts we remain steeped in poverty? It's because we lack individuals. Not people, individuals. Because too many of our fellow citizens have thrown away their capacity for independent thought. Because too many have abandoned their creative potential in exchange for a pretense at existence. Because we have become a country of superficial imitators.

Have you ever quoted an author without understanding what he meant? Ever parroted an answer to get the grade? Ever watched a show, bought a dress, or joined a club not because you liked it but because everyone else has seen, admired or joined? Then you're as guilty as the bum on the street who refuses to work, and just as culpable for our country's indigence. Perhaps even more so, especially since we have the means and the education to have known better.

Well, today, I challenge you. To become individuals. To get our brains back and start pursuing a goal that's entirely our own. I challenge you to start standing on your own feet and on your own judgment. I know it's scary. And if anything goes wrong, we've no one to blame but ourselves. But I think being wrong a thousand times is worth more than living your life based on someone else's values. Millions are already doing that. They're everywhere. They're people who think one way but act another. They're kids who like fine arts but take up nursing because it's easier to earn that way. They're soldiers who die in battle without knowing why the battle was fought. It's time we started distinguishing ourselves from them.

No one profits from your being ordinary. Dare to imagine. To think BIG. Then, dare to make it come true. Let us push the limits of what is possible, but most of all, let's seek to give our lives purpose. Having fun and enjoying life does not necessarily mean pursuing the stupid, the popular, or the meaningless. Don't look for a job. Look for your calling. Don't find a hobby. Look for a passion. And if you want to study again, forget the diploma, get an education.

Through the years, philosophers have said that man was born with an innate desire to find the causes of things. Well, if you must search for meaning, then why not now and with your life?

Today, we are set adrift in an ocean of possibilities. Do you follow the stars or will you allow the ocean to make the choice for you. It's your life and the clock's ticking. Your move.

Thank you.

BE PROUD TO BE A FILIPINO

by Barth Suretsky, an American

My decision to move to Manila was not a precipitous one. I used to work in New York as an outside agent for PAL, and have been coming to the Philippines since August, 1982. I was so impressed with the country, and with the interesting people I met, some of which have become very close friends to this day, that I asked for and was granted a year's sabbatical from my teaching job in order to live in the Philippines. I arrived here on August 21, 1983, several hours after Ninoy Aquino was shot, and remained here until June of 1984. During that year I visited many parts of the country, from as far north as Laoag to as far south as Zamboanga, and including Palawan. I became deeply immersed in the history and culture of the archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal antiquities from both northern Luzon, and Mindanao.

In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in 1985, 1987, and 1991, before deciding to move here permanently in 1998. I love this country, but not uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article. First, however, I will say that I would not consider living anywhere else in Asia, no matter how attractive certain aspects of other neighboring countries may be. To begin with, and this is most important, with all its faults, the Philippines is still a democracy, more so than any other nation in Southeast Asia. Despite gross corruption, the legal system generally works, and if ever confronted with having to employ it, I would feel much more safe trusting the courts here than in any other place in the surrounding area. The press here is unquestionably the most unfettered and freewheeling in Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any way! And if any one thing can be used as a yardstick to measure the extent of the democratic process in any given country in the world, it is the extent to which the press is free.

But the Philippines is a flawed democracy nevertheless, and the flaws are deeply rooted in the Philippine psyche. I will elaborate... The basic problem seems to me, after many years of observation, to be a national inferiority complex, a disturbing lack of pride in being Filipino.

Toward the end of April I spent eight days in Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. I am certainly no expert on Vietnam, but what I saw could not be denied: I saw a country ravaged as no other country has been in this century by thirty years of continuous and incredibly barbaric warfare. When the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country was totally devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five years the nation has healed and rebuilt itself almost miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully restored. The opera house in Hanoi is a splended restoration of the original, modeled after the Opera in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire theater, on the main square of HCMC is as it was when built by the French a century ago. The streets are tree-lined, clean, and conducive for strolling. Cafes in the French style proliferate on the wide boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the government of Vietnam, which still has a long way to travel on the road to democracy, but I do praise, and praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese that has enabled its citizenry to undertake the miracle of restoration that I have described above. When I returned to Manila I became so depressed that I was actually physically ill for days thereafter. Why? Well, let's go back to a period when the Philippines resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was 1945, the end of World War II, and Manila, as well as many other cities, lay in ruins. (As a matter of fact, it may not be generally known, but Manila was the second most destroyed city in the entire war; only Warsaw was more demolished!)

But to compare Manila in 1970, twenty-five years after the end of the war, with HCMC, twenty-five years after the end of its war, is a sad exercise indeed. Far from restoring the city to its former glory, by 1970 Manila was well on its way to being the most tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And since that time the situation has deteriorated alarmingly. We have a city full of street people, beggars, and squatters. We have a city that floods sections whenever there is a rainstorm, and that loses electricity with every clap of thunder. We have a city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired roads we have a traffic situation second to none in the world for sheer unmanageability. We have rude drivers, taxis that routinely refuse to take passengers because of "many trappic!" The roads are also cursed with pollution-spewing buses in disreputable states of repair, and that ultimate anachronism, the jeepney! We have an educational system that allows children to attend schools without desks or books to accomodate them. Teachers, even college professors, are paid salaries so disgracefully low that it's a wonder that anyone would want to go into the teaching profession in the first place. We have a war in Mindanao that nobody seems to have a clue how to settle. The only policy to deal with the war seems to be to react to what happens daily, with no long range plan whatever. I could go on and on, but it is an endeavor so filled with futility that it hurts me to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of everything, I love the Philippines.

Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back to what I said above, it is my unshakable belief that the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once remarked to me, laconically: "All Filipinos want to be something else. The poor ones want to be American, and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants to be Filipino." That statement would appear to be a rather simplistic one, and perhaps it is. However, I know one Filipino who refuses to enter a theater until the national anthem has stopped being played because he doesn't want to honor his own country, and I know another one who thinks that history stopped dead in 1898 when the Spaniards departed! While it is certainly true that these represent extreme examples of national denial, the truth is not a pretty picture. Filipinos tend to worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it comes from Italy or France it has to be better than anything made here. If the idea is American or German it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos can think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to and idolized. Foreigners can go anywhere without question. In my own personal experience I remember attending recently an affair at a major museum here. I had forgotten to bring my invitation. But while Filipinos entering the museum were checked for invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort of thing happens so often here that it just accepted routine. All of these things, the illogical respect given to foreigners simply because they are not Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything Philippine, the rudeness of taxi drivers, the ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all symptomatic of a lack of self-love, of respect for and love of the country in which they were born, and worst of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to improve the situation.

Most Filipinos, when confronted with evidence of governmental corruption, political chicanery, or gross exploitation on the part of the business community, simply shrug their shoulders, mutter "bahala na," and let it go at that. It is an oversimplification to say this, but it is not without a grain of truth to say that Filipinos feel downtrodden because they allow themselves to feel downtrodden. No pride. One of the most egregious examples of this lack of pride, this uncaring attitude to their own past or past culture, is the wretched state of surviving architectural landmarks in Manila and elsewhere. During the American period many beautiful and imposing buildings were built, in what we now call the "art deco" style (although, incidentally, that was not a contemporary term; it was coined only in the 1960s). These were beautiful edifices, mostly erected during, or just before, the Commonwealth period. Three, which are still standing, are the Jai Alai Building, the Metropolitan Theater, and the Rizal Stadium. Fortunately, due to the truly noble efforts of my friend John Silva, the Jai Alai Building will now be saved. But unless something is done to the most beautiful and original of these three masterpieces of pre-war Philippine architecture, the Metropolitan Theater, it will disintegrate. The Rizal Stadium is in equally wretched shape. When the wreckers' ball destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and New York City's most magnificent building, Pennsylvania Station, both in 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architectural critic of The New York Times, wrote: "A disposable culture loses the right to call itself a civilization at all!" How right she was! (Fortunately, the destruction of Pennsylvania Station proved to be the sacrificial catalyst that resulted in the creation of New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a commission be created for Manila...)

Are there historical reasons for this lack of national pride? We can say that until the arrival of the Spaniards there was no sense of a unified archipelago constituted as one country. True. We can also say that the high cultures of other nations in the region seemed, unfortunately, to have bypassed the Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no Borobudurs. True. Centuries of contact with the high cultures" of the Khmers and the Chinese had, except for the proliferation of Song dynasty pottery found throughout the archipelago, no noticeable effect. True. But all that aside, what was here? To begin with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened with disintegration, incidentally, was an incredible feat of engineering for so-called "primitive" people. As a matter of fact, when I first saw them in 1984, I was almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first laid eyes on the astonishing Inca city of Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. The degree of artistry exhibited by the various tribes of the cordillera of Luzon is testimony to a remarkable culture, second to none in the Southeast Asian region. As for Mindanao, at the other end of the archipelago, an equally high degree of artistry has been manifest for centuries in woodcarving, weaving and metalwork.

However, the most shocking aspect of this lack of national pride, even identity, endemic in the average Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the history of the archipelago since unified by Spain and named Filipinas. The remarkable stories concerning the Galleon de Manila, the courageous repulsion of Dutch and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th centuries, even the origins of the Independence movement of the late 19th century, are hardly known by the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And thanks to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is few and far between the number of Filipinos who really know - or even care - about the duplicity employed by the Americans and Spaniards to sell out and make meaningless the very independent state that Aguinaldo declared on June 12, 1898. A people without a sense of history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own identity. It is sad to say, but true, that the vast majority of Filipinos fall category. Without a sense of who you are how can you possibly take any pride in who you are?

These are not oversimplifications. On the contrary, these are the root problems of the Philippine inferiority complex referred to above. Until the Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these ills of the soul will never be cured. If what I have written here can help, even in the smallest way, to make the Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was, and who he can be, I will be one happy expat indeed!