To the fledgling journalist
The Varsitarian, student publication of the University of the Santo Tomas, convened campus journalists all over the country last week for a three-day conference. Maybe, because I was once editor of the paper, I was asked to give the opening address. This is what I told these young intellectuals.
I am extremely pleased to be with you this morning; an antique hack like myself feels young in your company as if some kind of mental osmosis is working amongst us today. Being this ancient, I have amassed a pile of hindsights — sure, hindsight is the lowest form of wisdom, but just the same permit me to unload some for you, the basic mistakes I and my generation committed. Do not repeat them.
But first, the insights that are valuable for those who will lead this country intellectually.
Nurture memory because it will be your most important asset, because without individual and collective memory, there is no nation.
I am witness to much of our recent history, long before your parents were born. I came from a village, then migrated to the city. I have traveled all over this unhappy land and beyond. On occasion, I dined with the high and the mighty but I never forgot how it was to work in the fields of Barrio Cabugawan, or how to live in the warrens of Santa Cruz in Manila. Enshrine your roots in your heart and mind for by doing this you will anchor yourself to the unerring reality of your time and place and thereby provide yourself with the perspective with which you will then observe the world.
Having said these, consider now the writer’s primary function.
The first is to get to the truth and tell it plain if you are a journalist, with the frills and colors of art if you are a creative writer. In the telling, maybe you should also be guided by that old bromide about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Be humble; remember that Chinese injunction about how “we search and search for the truth and in the end, find there is no truth.”
The second: emphasize the obvious, particularly in the context of what we are. When an ignoramus movie star proclaims himself as our savior, do not hesitate to call him what he really is — a movie star, yes, but an ignoramus when it comes to leadership.
Always remember the story about that king who fooled his people into admitting that he wore the most beautiful robes when, in fact, he was naked. A clear-eyed child refused to be blinded and said the king had no clothes. Be that child, tell the truth.
And the most important rule is for you to stay alive. By this I mean, your writing should be lively, not so much with adjectives but with verbs, a prose that shimmers with neatness and precision. And, of course, you should stay physically alive, write about danger but protect yourself from it. Writing can be perilous for which reason some writers suffer the ultimate rebuke — assassination. Libel, of course, is the least dangerous critique. Avoid both.
My generation committed mistakes. We committed them because we are Filipinos cocooned in the old values of Pakikisama, etcetera. Values are neutral in themselves but we bended them to suit the urgencies of our time. We permitted charlatans to come to power when we should have exposed them. We propounded an inward-looking nationalism which blinded us to the possibilities of development. We believed so much in democracy — we didn’t realize it worked only for the rich and not for the poor. We were infected with megalomania. We neglected agriculture which we should have developed if only so we could feed ourselves. We permitted our oligarchs to exploit this nation and, like colonialists, let them salt their loot abroad instead of investing here in industries that would have provided jobs for our people. And because we did not do these, we demeaned our women who went abroad to work as housemaids and prostitutes. Yes, my generation is guilty of the rapine of the country; we made possible Marcos and Imelda, the anarchy which pervades our towns and cities and the sullen poverty which stares at all of us today.
It is abysmal for us to hand over to you the rubble of our failure, and to burden your generation with having to undo our mistakes. But we — and you — have no choice unless you leave this floundering ship and seek your future in calmer climates.
If you don’t leave, you can still reject this horrendous burden by ignoring it, by feasting on the carcass of the defeated like vultures. By abandoning your opportunity to be redeemers you will then join the legions of corrupters and the corrupted as, indeed, so many in my generation have done.
But if you elect to do what is difficult, to strive as so many of us have also tried, then you become both realist and dreamer; you recognize the barriers of culture, geography and the apathy of your countrymen. You join those courageous men and women, so many of them unknown, then and now, who sacrificed for this nation.
Our greatest mistake was that we deluded ourselves; we considered ourselves intellectuals when we really weren’t because intellectuals should know when they are wrong.
So remember this, because you will now be the new intellectuals, the anointed intelligentsia.
In becoming media workers, you become the brains of the nation. You may not be aware of this role but it is so when you shape public opinion and light the darkened labyrinths of public perception and the murky corridors of power.
You must be critics of almost everything. This is difficult to do because we are thin-skinned and we do not take to criticism easily; in fact, when our work is criticized, we take it as an attack on our persons. Also, there is a tendency for the criticized to invalidate the criticism no matter how grounded in truth and objectivity. By destroying the critic, demolishing his credibility, the criticism is ignored.
Criticism is important because it is with criticism that we get to know our faults, our weaknesses which we can then remedy or vanquish. It is in this light that we must attend to criticism, to profit from it rather than regard criticism as stigma.
But you cannot be useful critics if you are shallow, if you don’t have thorough knowledge and grounding. This we must recognize for we are a shallow people, with really no philosophical or critical tradition, with so much of our culture being folk and simple.
I do not mean to denigrate the folk for our folk culture has its uses. But we must be grounded on something deeper not so much in the past but in matters of the spirit.
As I have always pointed out, the great religions of Asia — Buddhism and Hinduism — did not really touch us for most of us are Christians. Both Hinduism and Buddhism have a tradition in philosophy, in the deepest source of knowledge. There is Confucius, Mencius in China, the Hindu philosophers, Ayurveda, the Hindu classics.
True, Western civilization, Christianity, has roots in Greek and Judaic traditions but we hardly known anything of these. Greek and Latin are no longer taught in our schools the way they are taught in Europe. So we miss out on the basics of Western thought for that is what we are — Westerners — not the Asians we would like to think we are. History has deemed otherwise and we can do nothing to change that past. We can only learn from it. But we can do a lot about the present, and certainly about the future, which is ours to shape.
The writer’s life is difficult for writers make so little. Bright young people come to me for advice and I always tell them they should forego writing because it does not pay. But if they insist as they often do, I ask if they are rich and when they say no, I then tell them to get married to a rich man or woman so that someone can support them while they attend to their vocation — for writing is a vocation, just like the priesthood, medicine, teaching. You go into these not because you will get rich but because you want to serve.
But let me assure you that if you become writers you will never get bored — time will simply pass without your knowing it. And there is that exultant lifting of the spirit, that sense of achievement, of joy when you have written something which touches you yourself and the others who read it. That is one pleasure — orgiastic in its intensity, which no money can ever buy!
And another thing — writing is a noble profession. Our past is emblazoned with the works of our greatest writers — they who shaped our first consciousness of nation, who forged our first Constitution, whose heirs fought our oppressors, foreign and native. I will name just one, Rizal, for there are so many of them who, with their pen and with their very lives, informed us and the world, that we are a talented and heroic people.
Will you join their ranks?
