If a man writes a better book, if he can preach a better sermon, if he can make a better candlestick than anyone else, though he make his home in the woods, the world will beat a trodden path to his door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember the last time I was forced to put on gloves for a boxing match. I was 8 years old then. I was left by my parents at the care of my grandparents in the farm. My uncle, a younger brother of my father had brought me into a barrio fiesta. There were many kids coming from the highlands also. There were native Aetas that were also roaming around the barrio to join the Christians' festivity.
A boxing match for kids was organized and many adults were excited to place bets. And many barrio kids were also eager to showcase their boxing prowess. My uncle at that time had no male child. Without prior notice, he brought me inside the makeshift arena and disturbingly announced that I was an experienced boxer from a nearby town. I was stunned, not knowing what to do and seeing those ferocious eyes of local kids whose muscular built-up could be mistaken as that of highschool bullies. They were naturally trained by their fathers for a fight. Boxing match was a favorite past time of farmers in the barrio then. After their body-aching toils at the rice fields, those folks had zealously groomed their sons to become a professional pugilists. Unfortunately for me, I had never been to a fistfights. If my uncle had groomed me for that, perhaps I had the nerve to fight those kids, but there was none.
Against my will, they put gloves on my pugs. I cried so hard because I was at a loss to understand my uncle’s unreasonableness. My uncle became red upon seeing my refusal to fight. Other adults around were shouting incessantly against me inside the ring and repeatedly chanting taunting words like: “bayot (gay), talawan (coward)”. I was scared. I did not have the guts to throw a punch.
I was only relieved when my aunty, got inside the arena and berated my uncle for his uncalled action. She even threatened the organizer to be reported to authorities for the illegal gambling that were taking place. It was a comfort upon seeing my fearless aunty defended me against any kind of aggression at that moment. She took me out of the ring and like a wary hen ready to brawl against anyone who would harm her chicks, she rescued me then.
Some professional pugilists confessed that before entering into that kind of job, they have experienced countless fistfights. They had been into brawling match. They confided that they had instinct to take blows and throw some of it against their opponents. Maybe this is inherently a cultural stereotyping which can be attributed to Spanish influence. I am a man if I can instill fear on others. I am a man if I can use aggression as a way of settling differences. It was a stereotyping world that defined manhood as being a warrior, a macho- image portrayal. If we cannot peacefully settle any differences, we will use force and aggression. It is always a common manly statement at the end of any unsettled issues with malefic rhetoric like: sinumbagayon na lang nato ni…(let's settle this matter through a fistfight).
I could summon all kinds of reason about such erroneous understanding about manhood. Maybe Kenny Rogers’ song was a little bit exaggerated. His song entitled: “Coward of the County” gave me an ice-cold feeling for many years, and my thoughts never missed to replay those of my own childhood experience. That was more than 30 years ago. .
It sounds a gambling, huh? Nope, these combined numbers had something to do with good old days. Numbers 2488 was our house number of our past residence. The Post Office was once the most popular and well patronized service provider of sending and receiving correspondences, this includes love letters to some distant girlfriends while some have kept their pen pals from abroad, congratulatory notes, and also notes from confidantes trying to diffuse their ballooning inner emotional turmoils. Letters from friends, from distant nephews and nieces, it had kept my mailbox 2488 brimful every month.
It was fun writing letters. It was the traditional as well as the ancient way of communicating our messages to other human beings. Letters were so personalized that it was difficult to plagiarize. We communicated our thoughts and feelings through those written languages by our own penmanship and readers have deciphered those written codes just like listening to a monologue from our preachers and lecturers.
Unlike this present electronic age, sending a message via SMS was becoming very impersonal and sometimes disturbingly offensive. Somebody may sent you an SMS message like I LOVE YOU and later recanted by texting you: "Sorry wrong sent", this sounds weird. There was a time when writing letters was considered as a university degree and the graduate becomes a “man of letters”. We know this from our Philippine history that many of our national heroes, those mestizos who were sent to study in great universities of Spain and took on courses like Philosophy and Letters.
As we compose letters, our foremost objective was to transmit our thoughts clearly to readers. It was always compensating to receive a reply to the letters we sent. I have devoted regular hours each week to compose those countless letters and sent them to my web of friends. It was a metaphor. The cellphone texting came and had been made public almost 10 years later. Since then, the craze of writing letters just waned and many were agog with the new technology that almost desecrated and ravaged our instruments of communication. It's true that technolgy helps connect people from accross the globe. But it is also true that technoolgy had slaughtered our long cherish respect for proper spelling of the languages we used. It was "Jejemon" texting that our kids and many adults are becoming familiar with.
Back on my 2488 mailbox, I boldly wrote those numbers at the top of my mailbox where the postman could easily locate. That mailbox 2488 had contained countless letters from acquaintances, from school friends, from relatives and even from a hermit whose simple rural living had made me aware of his contentment and resilience in the concentrated and remote place inside the jungles of New Corella. These experiences have kept me moving, writing and writing all the more, but it’s no longer for mailing, it’s now for blogging.
We hitched a ride on a truck, hauling logs for the saw mill in the nearby town. Logs were unloaded at the pond in the wharf for wood treatment. Our quest of traveling all the way from our town towards a neighboring town’s dock site was to test our shallow-water swimming skills as kids.
It was our wanderlust that had drove us to fulfill such risky adventure. We were in grade school then. On that bottomless log pond, we wanted to prove to other kids in our place our newly-discovered swimming skills. In the 70s, foreign vessels docked there, importing large volume of woods from the waning forest of the region.
Our lunch pack consisted of a cooked rice and a piece of fried dried fish. My swimming coach was a boyhood neighbor of my age. My share on that adventure was a five peso bill for contingency if getting a free ride on a logging truck would be impossible. Keeping that swimming escapade unknown from our parents’ intervention was part of the plan.
Upon arrival, we readily plunged into the deep pond, crowded with floating logs in the surface which had literally blocked the dark underwater abyss from the high noon sun’s penetrating light. Kids of our age were also there and fearlessly could dive from the stern of a decommissioned old tug boat anchored eternally in the wharf; its corroding steel hull was thickened by sea weeds and the spiking cluster of shells abundantly glued on the boat’s rudder underneath.
It was on that log pond that our childhood fear over the dark underwater abyss was subdued. All our unfounded dread about the mysterious deep was rectified by that experience. Those tales of unfriendly submarine creatures, those ugly shokoys and mystical mermaids that may have ruled down on that bottomless underwater, our wild thought about unknown deep water species abducting helpless mortals was disproved.
We had freely taken our first dive from the stern of that vintage tug boat. And lo! Since then, our fear about the deep sea was gone. It was as if the deep sea had embraced us, it was the deep log pond that had assured us that we were friends. The deep water had shown us and profoundly taught us not to fear the deep but to respect and enjoy the deep waters of the log pond.
It was my swimming coach, a childhood buddy who had coaxed us to dive on that deep log pond. He literally gave us a push to overcome our fear. It was he who defied his own personal fear about the deep log pond. Thanks to our coach. This note is for him.
“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”
Most towering coconut trees are harnessed with foot groves intently cut on the side of tree trunk. These foot groves, known in the vernacular as hakhak, were made while the trees were still young and reached at least 10 feet high. Coconut climbers used these foot groves as a typical ladder to reach the top. Many persistent coconut climbers have strong muscular legs and broad muscled torsos. Their abdomens are literally sculpted with muscle packs, which our present urban gym- fanatics have consciously aspired to achieve.
Gaining mastery on climbing tall coconut trees had been my craft during grade school.
After successfully conquered the tallest coconut tree in the neighborhood, our maninguete neighbor waited me in the ground after mounting and scolded me. Telling me the risks that I had fortunately avoided. He strongly warned me of disclosing the incident to my working parents. I made promise to my concerned neighbor that I would refrain doing such dangerous climb again in the future.
Those unusual climbs were addictive. As one could reach the top of the tree, the difficulty lies on how to enter into the crowding palm leaves, one must figure out first before proceeding through the maze of obstructing palm leaves. Here lies the great danger of placing your weight against a weak or a dead palm leaf. Any miscalculation could result to accidents. One cousin of mine, floated on air when the palm leaf he had stepped into had accidentally detached from the trunk due to the leaf’s inability to bear his weight. He had literally surfed on air, and looked like Aladin standing over his plumetting carpet. He was fortunate he only suffered minor injury.
At the top of those trees, I enjoyed the rocking and swaying, it was like an inverted pendulum movement generated by unhampered strong winds. Up there I had seen the vast rice fields. There were no tall structures in the town then. Those coconut trees had bountifully dominated the skylines of our slumbering town then.
Today, not one of those tall coconut trees had survived in the prime lands. Those vast rice fields are now hosts to growing residential houses of the city. More modern skyscrapers are dominating the skylines of the city nowadays. Those childhood feats that I did 30 years ago were truly uncommon. At midlife, one could simply muse those extraordinary boyhood adventures. I think it was those inordinate gush of youthful Adrenaline that were released and had brought me on those unimaginable heights.
Kids are getting wiser
than most of their parents in relation to this evolving digital technology. Since
these kids are ushered into this era of information technology which many of
their parents are still continually wrestling and attempting to master. In the
future, this Net Generation also known as N-Geners as author Don Tapscott in
his book Growing Up Digital has described
will ultimately rule and an undesirable prophecy will be realized, the children
will rule the nations. Men have cowered and the children rule.
Because most parents of
today are unwilling to learn and familiarize the new technology, the intricacy
of computers and the Internet, the inevitable consequence of offsprings getting
more knowledgeable about the technology than their average parents can achieved.
A new rule of the game will take shape in the coming age and it will be
dictated by inexperienced and tender shoot Internet- savvy kids.
The parents who are reluctant
to adapt these changes will surely suffer from the unparalleled revolt that
will rock many parents-children relationships. These wise kids will begin to
craft their own worlds, equipped with customized security measures that many
technology-dumb parents can impossibly decipher and decode. With this scenario,
the children will begin to assert their rules in this global technology they
have freely accessed and mastered. Was the Lebanese
philosopher, Khalil Gibran had precisely predicted when he had penned these
lines on his poem entitled Children?
“Your children are
not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them
your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
If parents won’t exert
the necessary effort to learn what their children have successfully gained, such
unparalleled technology expertise, the fearful revolt over parental authorities
is in the offing.
Love alone can conquer
this fear. If parents can nurture love in the hearts of their children, surely
the unwanted rebellion against parental authorities will be preempted. Only this
unconditional love of parents to their children can conquer such threatening
forces that are now taking shape as a consequence of the emergence of this
powerful electronic technology, the computers and the Internet. The parents of
today are the products of a bygone culture where militarism and the enforcement
of discipline using physical as well as verbal abuse was the normal mode. Our
children today are literally shielded by advocacies of children’s rights and
welfares that are spelled into laws of the land. And such laws will be shrewdly
used by some children as their license to challenge all our presently established
social boundaries, which was intended to maintain peace and order of the
society. Will this democratization of knowledge via the revolution of
electronic technology and brazenly poured into the hands of inexperienced youth
could lead to an unavoidable catastrophic anarchy?
The adult parents must
humbly admit and accept that their children are getting the upper hand in this
race towards achieving mastery over our digital technology. The fact that our
children are born in an era when the computer technology and the powerful
Internet are becoming widely accessible; it’s a metaphor that our children are
born with hands and fingers ready to tap computer keyboards. It was not the
sucklings and thumb suckings that today’s babes will easily learn, children are
destined to embrace this phenomenal on-line, and hooked up environment, and it
was the flashes of digital cameras that greeted them first when they were laid
at the delivery tables of hospitals. And while they were still unborn inside
their mothers’ wombs, it was the electronic ultrasound apparatus that have
detected their heartbeats and have generated their 3D images on their fetal curling
position while floating in amniotic fluids inside the wombs, and their genders
were determined in advance.
The parents who have
basic understanding about the technology of today will inevitably become ignorant
of the relentlessly evolving technology in the future which only the adaptive
minds of our young kids can surely catch up. As parent’s capacity to learn
declines in direct proportion to regressing old age, in contrast with their
progeny’s expansion of mental absorption, the latter will definitely outran their
parents in this speed-light race against these unending technology innovations.
Our children’s
adeptness with the new technology is no guarantee for them for an ultimate
success to cope against future uncertainties. While parents are seasoned with
experiences in handling and overcoming numerous difficulties in the past, sadly
they are also handicapped by the lack of knowledge on the intricacy of this ubiquitous
new technology found in the digital world.
It will take uncommon
humility for parents to admit of their children’s supremacy in the latter’s
control and adaption of this dynamic technology. It is a common fear among
adults and parents that such admittance of inadequacy before young kids could
mean an erosion of parental authorities that are welded naturally over our
emotionally charged juveniles. This could be hard reality for many parents, an
unharnessed walking through a tightrope. The unmarried adults and childless
couples are spared from this dilemma, but they too will feel the inevitable
result of young peoples’ dominance over this digital conundrum.
There is a need for
parents and children to forge mutual agreements. The young ones expertise must
be tempered by their parents’ emotional stabilities rightfully gained through
deep and sustained experiences in coping with unpredictable troubles. The young
ones must also acknowledge that their untested emotions must be guided by a
strong parental support. Kids’ technology expertise when teamed up with parents
emotional maturity, it could be a superb combination to cope up all future
uncertainties brought by this perpetually moving technological innovations.
The attainment of parent’s
maturity is a function of time and the element of vulnerability from painful consequences
resulting from trial and error decision makings that took place in the past.
The youth just lacked the time necessary for gaining emotional maturity. There
is no shortcut for gaining such essential virtue for survival. It takes time.
However, the youths have gained intellectual advancement as compared to their
parents’ turtle -pace with just an increment of time.
The kids were
internally pre-casted to embrace the external digital world. It was a metaphor
that our young kids’ inner content is completely compatible with the outer
context of this digital world. When the internal content compatibly aligns with
the external context, what unimaginable result will come out from it? This same
is true with our inexperience youths. The parents should accept this fact.
Unless parents humbly accept this reality of their children’s ability of
learning the technology faster than what the former can absorb in this ever
mutating digital technology and that are unraveling before us.