Dare You to Fly
abueno@theguidon.com
My friend blogged one day: “While watching a news report on the earthquake in China, hindi ko napigilang umiyak (I couldn’t help but cry).”
Initially, it sounds bizarre. People cry over melodramatic soap operas and sad movie endings, not news reports. We don’t cry, for example, when we learn of news like these, which all happened during the summer:
1. The rice crisis
2. The increase in jeepney and bus fare rates
3. The proposed Meralco breakup
4. A new witness in the NBN-ZTE deal, plus photos supposedly proving the anomalous deal
We don’t cry over these, do we?
Perhaps you’ve read JK Rowling’s recent commencement address at Harvard. In that speech, she stresses the power of imagination—not only for fairytales or bedtime stories—but imagination that enables someone to put himself in another person’s shoes. “In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, [imagination] is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared,” she said.
Perhaps that is what my friend did: he imagined himself to be one of the victims, one of those crushed under the rubble, one of those who had the potential to be, to be more, but will never be.
For most, however, there’s a kind of numbness, almost an inhumanity, that’s associated with watching the news and reading it. The quick, straightforward way of reporting on deaths, scandals, and crises does not measure up to the slow, painful grief, suffering, and dilemma of the people behind the news. Yes, they are people, too—not merely subjects of news articles.
In a talk I attended on good narrative reporting in the age of new media, speaker Janet Steele emphasized the importance of putting a human face behind every report. Perhaps, this also translates to readers trying to find the human face in every issue or event, and not merely knowing the details about it.
Maybe it is not enough to merely listen when we watch the news. Maybe now it is not enough to be informed. Perhaps, as Rowling says, we should “imagine”—what if I was poor and couldn’t afford three meals a day? What if I was one of those family members who lost a loved one in China? What if I wasn’t as privileged as I am now?
Before asking who, what, when, where, why, or how of an event, let’s ask ourselves first: so what? If there’s a rice crisis, so what? Because many people are already dying of hunger as it is, that’s so what.
With that said, maybe this is a more appropriate listing of the news reports mentioned in the first part:
1. Because of the rice crisis, more Filipinos are hungry and suffering.
2. Because of the increase in jeep and bus fare rates, more Filipinos are finding it hard to budget their already meager incomes.
3. Because of the proposed Meralco breakup, Filipinos may have a chance to lessen electricity rates, and make their financial burdens a little easier to bear.
4. Because of the new witness and the photos on the NBN-ZTE deal, we are more convinced of the corruption in the government, and that we should do something about it.
5. Because of the earthquake in China, we realize that lives may be taken away anytime, that only God knows what will happen next, and that ultimately, our purpose in this world is not to fulfil our own desires, but to continually answer and act upon each ‘so what’ we may encounter.
