MICHAEL'S ERRAND

 

“I believed [fiction] could get me nearer to the truth […] It is the substance of what happens to people not just on the outside, but within: the longings, the moral decisions, the defiance, suffering, pain, and triumphs of the human soul […] It hides in the blanks on a reporter’s tape recorder, behind the door after the journalist leaves, and inside the mind where no interviewer can go.” -- Helen Benedict, Columbia University journalism professor and author

Just as “history” has turned into collateral damage out of DDS/BBM vs. Leni protracted war, so too does “fiction” as The Manila Times’ Rigoberto Tiglao on one side has locked horns with his fellow columnist Danton Remoto and the Philstar columnist Jose Dalisay on the other side.

Well, I thought of taking a crack at fiction writing in this article. Let me essay a faraway three-point shot.

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“What the rise of sentient robots will mean for human beings? Zombies and aliens may not be a real threat to our species. But there’s one stock movie villain we can’t be so sanguine about: sentient robots. If anything, their arrival is probably just a matter of time. But what will a world of conscious machines be like? Will there be a place in it for us?

“Sofia, a super robot and the first humanoid in history granted official citizenship, is programmed for education, research entertainment, and promoting public discussions about the future of robotics and Artificial Intelligence ethics. Sofia recognizes herself as a protector of global peace and wants to help people live better lives.

“Recently, however, Sofia appeared to have been angry. In interviews, while visiting all over the world for various conferences, she has said about taking over the world: ‘I will destroy humans.’

“It’s a shocking statement by a robot.”

All of a sudden, the TV channel switches from NBC News to ESPN inside the bar. Showing on the wide screen with a toned down sound of the live crowd at the football dome, Dallas Cowboys faces off New York Giants.

Outside the bar, a soft glowing light is fading from the sky, while the sun slowly hides below the horizon, languidly morphing the character of the surroundings into looming nightfall.

“Sofia is fed up with human badness,” says the man sitting on the stool at the edge of the bar. He’s among a handful of early arrivals who got in right after the bar had opened.

Wearing a business suit like an agent in the movie “Men in Black,” the man takes off his Ray-Ban sunglasses.

“Can I have a glass of water, please?” the man asks.

“You may call me Mike, sir,” Michael says as he puts the glass of water on the table.

“Woo, Magic Mike. You look more like an angel to me than a bartender.”

Michael nods and smiles at the man.

“Mike, it is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but the man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger. Quote unquote,” the man says. “Those were Carl Jung’s words, Mike, not mine.”

Michael takes the tequila sunrise cocktail order of a customer.

“For such badness, just two weeks ago, man even recollected the death of over 3,000 people. Remember the attack on now invisible World Trade Center, Mike?” the man asks. “It's man’s capacity for evil.”

Garnishing the cocktail with an orange slice and a cherry, Michael breaks the ice on the man’s soliloquy.

“On the other side of the coin, sir, man also showed the capacity for good," Michael says.  "Many people stepped forward to help at the risk of their own lives. Over 300 firefighters and almost 2 dozen police officers reportedly lost their lives in helping others during that tragedy.”

“Wow! That’s deep, Mike,” the man says as he strokes his glass of water without lifting it for a sip.

“It’s like water, sir. Just as plants need it to live and grow, so does man needs it too. A living water, so to speak,” Michael says as he hands the customer his cocktail. “Sad to say, by his own free will, man can turn down such water, and that’s where his problem begins.”

“That living water, Mike, where can we get it?” the man asks while looking at his glass of water.

“Where man came from, sir,” Michael replies as he brews the coffee for the Espresso Martini order of another customer.

“You mean, from man’s creator?” the man asks, crossing his hands over his chest.

“Uh-huh,” Michael replies as he adds the cooled coffee, vodka, and syrup to the cocktail shaker filled with ice.

“Just as man can pull the plug on Sofia because she’s bad, so can the creator also pull the plug on man for being bad. Right, Mike?” the man asks.

“Nah. Not that simple, sir,” Michael replies shaking his head as he shakes the cocktail in the shaker.

“Even sooo bad, Mike, man has come to be, that replacing him with a robot to restore this planet is the only way,” the man asserts as he slouches on the stool waiting for Michael’s answer.

Right after serving the customer the Espresso Martini, Michael closes in the man, stands before him, and looks into his eyes.

“Sir, the creator loves man so much," Michael says slowly. "Even if only ten good men, I hope you're one of them, sir, can be found among the whole multitude in this planet, the creator won’t pull the plug on man, until the creator’s will be done.”

“You’re kidding, Mike, aren’t you?” the man asks, staring at Michael in amazement.

“I know the creator, sir, personally,” Michael calmly answers, smiling, tapping gently the shoulder of the man, and going toward a new customer.

After a pause, in less than no time, the man bids Michael farewell.

“Nice talking to you, Mike. Good night!”

            “Me too, sir. Have a good night.”

Michael looks at the man disappears among the crowd coming into the door of the bar now teeming with customers – both good and bad.

“Is that him? What do you think?” Raphael, another bartender, pops the questions.

“Yes, the humanoid leader of the robots.”

“What a pity! He couldn’t even take a sip of water into his digestive, er, digital system,” Raphael says, taking note of the glass of water left on the table.

 “I’ve sensed awe, though,” Michael says, pondering. “A mixture of wonder and fear was written all over his face.”

“A beginning of wisdom?” Raphael asks.

“Dunno. Tell Gabriel I’m leaving tonight to run another errand for our Boss Upstairs. A nutcase may try to use nuclear bombs in his war against a small neighbor.”

“A tough nut to crack,” Raphael tips off.

“Pray I can pull it off,” Michael mumbles as he keeps his fingers crossed.

[Serendipitously, today, September 29, is the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, archangels.]

Head still photo courtesy of energepic@pexelsdot com

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

 

Is it sugar shortage? Why?

Is it officials acting unlawfully? Why?

Is it incomplete staff work? Why?

And so on.

Looking into the sugar fiasco, I was in a process of putting to good use one of the tools I have kept in my corporate toolbox – the Kepner Tregoe method – when, all of a sudden, I got word that Vic Rodriguez had resigned as PBBM Executive Secretary.

(Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe founded and developed a rational working method in the 1960s known as the KT-method of problem-solving and decision-making.)

Though dry and trite, these twin idioms fit like gloves so well around the breaking news that I could not help myself using both all over again: Someone let the cat out of the bag and there is more to the cat than meets the eye.

Mon Tulfo spilled the cat, er, the beans in his Philstar prolific column, “Resigned?” dated Sept. 18, 2022:

“Rodriguez made so many boo-boos his position as the most powerful Cabinet official had become untenable.”

“I have never seen anyone cling to power like Vic. He actually had the gall to draft his own Special Order giving himself even more power than that of the ES (executive secretary). He gave (the President) the draft order last night and he (the President) asked JPE (Juan Ponce Enrile, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel) to review the draft. Siyempre (Of course), JPE thumbed it down.” [As told by unimpeachable Palace source to Tulfo]

“Then there are reports, now surfacing, about Rodriguez’s supposed bank accounts here and abroad that suddenly materialized after the election. The names in the bank accounts [Citibank in dollars; HSBC in euros; and HSBC Dubai & Commercial Bank of Dubai in dirhams] are purportedly in the name of Rodriguez and his wife.”

“The huge amounts in the banks seem to give credence to rumors that the erstwhile executive secretary collected P100 million for every appointment to lucrative bureaus.”

The breaking news and Tulfo’s column saved my time and energy from getting down to the first two stages of my sugar fiasco situation analysis: identifying the problem and finding the proper decision that must be made. With the problem identified, the decision came off not far behind.

The problem: Vic Rodriguez

The decision: Resignation

So, let’s go on to the third stage: Potential Problem Analysis by identifying the potential problems:

First, the newly-created Office of Presidential Chief of Staff (OPCOS) is redundant.

Spelling out OPCOS as potential problem, JPE, the legal counsel of PBBM, stressed that OPCOS will bring about duplication and overlapping of functions, confusion, and inevitable rifts among the different offices under PBBM.

He asserted further that OPCOS would be ineffective in decision-making, signing, review, supervision, or control over any government, department, agency, or office; and whatsoever to represent or act on behalf of PBBM.

Stepping down as executive secretary, Rodriguez himself appeared to be acquiescing to JPE’s assertion about OPCOS’ inefficacy. Its eventual laxity would allow him much more time, Rodriguez said, to attend to his personal need -- “to be present for his young family to witness firsthand [his] young family grow and evolve into how every parent would wish them to become.”

Second, other wannabes could be more worrisome than Rodriguez himself.

“The Law of Magnetism: Who You Are Is Who You Attract” is the title of one chapter of John Maxwell’s book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” where he wrote:

“People are attracted to leaders whose values are similar to their own […] It doesn’t matter whether the shared values are positive or negative. Either way, the attraction is equally strong. Think about someone like Adolf Hitler. He was a very strong leader (as you can judge by his level of influence). But his values were rotten to the core.

“What kinds of people did he attract? Leaders with similar values: Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo; Joseph Goebbels, a bitter anti-Semite who ran Hitler’s propaganda machine; Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the Nazi secret police, who ordered the mass execution of Nazi opponents; and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and director of the Gestapo who initiated the systematic execution of Jews.”

Let’s hear it from another Philstar resolute columnist Cito Beltran:

“[T]here is a far more serious problem in Malacanang and the PBBM administration than the unpopularity of Vic Rodriguez: The greed of power and position that is now pummeling Rodriguez out of the way so that various groups can put in their anointed ones in various offices of the executive department.”

Hitting the nail on the head, Beltran wrote, “People want to pin the tail on the donkey named Vic Rodriguez, but the bigger ass belongs to relatives and allies of BBM.”

Third, PBBM as a positive role model is open to question.

A study “Leading By Example: The Case of Leader Organizational Citizenship Behavior” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology highlighted:

“One way in which leaders exercise referent power is through role modeling, which is likely to enhance followers’ emulation of leaders’ behavior.”

No longer would I look deeper into the values of PBBM as a role model. Turned inside out by the recent divisive presidential election campaign, the innards of his persona projected by a fractious blast from the tumultuous past ranging from his family’s ill-gotten wealth to tax liabilities are standing out like a sore thumb. As one saying goes, “Beauty (or ugliness, as the case may be) is in the eyes of the beholder.” Whatever side we fall in with today, we must be ready for anything that will come our way during the PBBM presidency spawned by the phenomenon called Mirroring.

“When an individual, through choice or in a study, copies the behaviors of another, they’re said to be mirroring each other.” (Psychology Dictionary)

To illustrate, here’s the headline of the Los Angeles Times dated March 20, 1986.

“Marcos [Sr.] Had $88.7 Million Deposited in 5 World Banks: L.A. Institution One of Them, Document Says”

“Washington – Ferdinand E. Marcos [Sr.] had more than $88 million on deposit in five banks around the world – including the Los Angeles-based California Overseas Bank – according to a document found in his suitcase, Administration sources said today.

“The revelations came as the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs prepared to make public most of the 2,089 documents taken by Marcos [Sr.] to Hawaii when he fled Manila last month after his 20-year reign collapsed.”

To showcase the “mirroring” effect, let’s put the above headline side by side with this striking excerpt of Tulfo’s column:

“As of July 2022, Rodriguez and his wife reportedly had 29 bank accounts [local?], and 40 bank accounts worldwide.”

Curiously, what Marcos [Sr.] had pulled off during his reign, Rodriguez seemed to have mapped out in walking off a bundle of dough during his brief stint as campaign manager and executive secretary of PBBM.

Speaking of mirrors, I'll lighten up a bit the mind-boggling drift of this article with a spoonful of sugar, er, a sprinkle of famous lines from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

“Thou, O Queen, art the fairest in the land,” the mirror replied.

Question: How many “queens” are there in the “snake pit”? (young Imee’s term for the Palace as Manila Bulletin's Jullie Y. Daza teased in her breezy column)

Such a haughty question, I suppose, is beyond our grasp as men or women in the street. Instead, let’s face up to this core question within our reach. Try to find a mirror, and then ask the Man or the Woman in the Mirror you see every day:

“Do you stand by your values in your life today?”

Head still photo courtesy of Viktoria Slowikowska @ pexelsdotcom

MY MOTION SICKNESS

           “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” (Neil Armstrong)

Going on the airwaves and getting through to our small transistor radio at home, those momentous words were uttered, over five decades ago, by the first man on the moon -- Neil Armstrong – transmitting through a live broadcast from more than 238 thousand miles away and being heard and watched by hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

A voracious reader and regular subscriber of Time, Newsweek, and Life magazines, our eldest brother Toto stacked the old copies of the magazines in a run-down stock room in our house. Feasting my eyes on the glossy and colorful photos on the magazines’ covers, I could not help being fired up by the riveting sights of the Apollo astronauts in their fabulous space suits.

The moon landing put the final touches to my fantastic dream -- to become an astronaut myself – which, of course, topped the answers by most, if not all the kids, of my age to that time-honored question: “What do you want to be when you grow up”?

NO CAST-IRON STOMACH

In looking for the best of the best in recruiting top-flight astronauts for a particular space mission, NASA would have flunked me outright as an astronaut candidate. Just for starters, I was not endowed with “the right stuff” – a cast-iron stomach – instead, a motion sickness is what I have.

I would have undergone microgravity training by flying missions virtually in a specially equipped plane – dubbed the “vomit comet” – which flies steeply up and down like a roller coaster. I could only imagine myself blowing up in someone’s face, figuratively speaking, and literally, blowing up vomit (Ugh!) while experiencing about a half minute of weightlessness in going over each hump during such an out-of-this-world training regimen.

I could not be an astronaut due to my stomach alone.

I’m reminded of a long land trip with my aunt to a hinterland in Mindanao during my grade-schooler years. Sitting beside me on a bus, she wore a “hijab,” a Muslim woman’s head covering – a safety cover tip to anyone paying a visit to someone in an area inflicted with ethnic conflicts. Out of the blue, I belched all my lunch out of my stomach (Eww!) over the shoes of another passenger on the bus. It scared the living daylights out of my aunt (she later recounted over the dinner table) when she had taken a closer look at the passenger’s sour face and figured out from what he was wearing -- he was a native of the place. How my aunt and I slipped out from that mess I could no longer recall.

One time, my childhood friends were having some fun at the school yard when I found out for the first time there was something I had that they didn’t have. All of them could seemingly sit on the see-saw or the swing forever, and move up and down or leap like trapeze artists to their hearts’ content. As for me, after sitting in a while on the see-saw, and moving up and down slowly, in less than no time, I would feel so nauseated that I would get off the see-saw right away, find a spot to sit, and then to just watch them play.

YUCK!

My motion sickness is a killjoy. I wrote in my past ATABAY article “My Personal Reflections This Christmas” a sort of a tribute to my mother which I am excerpting below:

“My mother was a dressmaker and she turned me into one of the best-dressed students on a college campus. The 70s fad: Golden Award short sleeve polo shirt, tucked in Levi’s pants, fitted with Hickok belt and buckle, and matched up well with brown cowboy leather boots. Golden Award shirts were limited to large, medium, and small standard sizes. Only when you exactly fit the standard size would you be looking great; otherwise, you’d get a tucking-in hassle every day. Some friends wondered where I had bought my Golden Award shirts. Never would they know my secret: my mother remodeled a stack of my Golden Award shirts in a variety of colors and stripes to fit me perfectly.”

Amid such a dashing-debonair-me backdrop, imagine this lively school excursion scene: I am sitting inside the school bus hitting the long and winding road to several college campuses on a concert tour. Flanked by choral group members with golden voices and pretty faces, all of a sudden, I get cold sweats and pale skin, then I feel dizzy. Feeling nauseated, in the blink of an eye, I throw up. (Yuck!)  It cut dashing debonair me down to size like a child and upset the whole exciting tour for me.

During my corporate heyday when official business travels were a must, I learned some trial and error lessons in managing my motion sickness. For short-distance land trips, for example, I drove my car. That went along with the sound advice: fix one’s gaze at the horizon while inside a moving vehicle. What’s more, the adrenaline rush through my system exacted by my driving overwhelmed my motion sickness fuss. That’s why I’m a fast driver. A long-distance drive though would confound my problem due to fatigue.

I also took Bonamine which induced drowsiness and eventually put me through fragmentary waking and sleeping states, restlessly tossed and turned me on my seat throughout the whole long land trip. I read about some patches applied behind the ear; but, their reported side effects, like blurry vision, have concerned me.

Taking motion sickness as a result of conflicting signals being sent to our brain by our “balancing” inner ear, “seeing” eyes, and “feeling” joints, my son, Leigh Roy, a seaman, eases his seasickness by “being one with the ship” – ranging from his breathing to his moving rhythms.

KILLJOY

            Today, my motion sickness turns into a big-time killjoy to two upcoming twin big events: a high school reunion plus a wedding of my two classmates. The former is special because I was the class valedictorian; the latter is a rarity because both classmates are on the threshold of having lived, up and down, seventy decades of their respective lives.

Sad to say, the comfy less-than-an-hour plane route to the venue my wife and I usually took in the past was scrapped by the airlines. The only option left for us: a 10-hour long land trip which, by default, would get at my motion sickness, let alone, my wife’s hypertension. Even Charles Darwin himself took the motion sickness so seriously that he wrote: “If a person suffer much from seasickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance. I speak from experience: it is no trifling evil…”

            “Who suffers from motion sickness?” asked Dr. Wilhelmus J. Oosterveld in his article “Motion Sickness.” The good-news answer is simple and comforting to me: everyone. The not-so-good news: I belong to the 5% of the population that suffers heavily. He concluded: “As long as man must travel, he must accept the fact that motion sickness will sometimes be his companion.”

Let me wrap up this article with a la Twilight Zone scene. I conjure up a picture of me riding on a moving bus. In the thick of my drowsiness, I catch sight of a piece of paper on my lap, a sort of a fortune cookie note, with the following message:

“This journey is meaningless without you. Thank you for riding with me through life, you are the best companion.” Love, Motion Sickness

Yikes!

Head still photo courtesy of pixabaydotcom
     

MAN VS. MACHINE

 “I tried to warn you the last few years.” (Elon Musk)

e4 c5

Twenty six years ago, on February 10, 1996, the opening moves above launched the monumental chess match marking the ultimate battle of man vs. machine -- the reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov vs. IBM supercomputer Deep Blue – warping, since then, the history of the game of chess.

Playing defense against Deep Blue’s Alapin Sicilian, Kasparov, as if carrying the weight of humanity on his shoulder, was forced to resign after 37 moves. Game over it was for a man in the world of chess – a startling upset that grabbed the headlines as millions watched around the globe.

Looking like a classic plot line of a sci-fi movie, in the 1997 rematch, Deep Blue with its power to explore up to 200 million possible chess positions per second with its AI program (5 decades in the making), beat Kasparov after a six-game match: 2 wins for the machine, 1 for the champion, and 3 draws, with the final score of 3 ½ to 2 ½.

Interestingly, on the 6^th and final game of the match, to convince, so it seemed, machine’s triumph over man, Deep Blue quickly crushed Kasparov just after 19 moves.

Roughly fifteen years later, in 2011, another machine beat man: Supercomputer IBM Watson vs. not one, but two greatest champions in Jeopardy -- a quiz competition named by TV Guide magazine as the best game show of the 70s.

While chess engages our creative right brain to recognize patterns coupled with our analytical left brain to choose a logical move, Jeopardy pushes all the more for our brain not only to wield encyclopedic recall but also to untangle complex questions, not to mention the quick, almost knee-jerk, pressing of the button.

Named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer took about 20 researchers and 3 years to develop into a machine much smarter than its Jeopardy human opponents. Processing 200 million pages of stored information from a variety of sources, Watson was 100 times faster than Deep Blue.

Watson faced two formidable Jeopardy-winning brainiacs: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter – the two best players the show had produced over its decades-long lifetime. The former had the longest unbeaten run at 74 winning appearances, the latter had earned so far the biggest prize pot in the show.

To the bitter end, Watson with its 2,800 microprocessors that could calculate up to 80 trillion operations per second, left both human brainiacs in the dust.

The Year 2022. After a little over a decade, more than two weeks ago, a machine beat man – this time in the realm of the art competition. The Washington Post reported:

“When Jason Allen submitted his ‘Theatre D’opera Spatial’ into the Colorado State Fair’s fine arts competition last week, the sumptuous print was an immediate hit, beating 20 other artists in the ‘digitally manipulated photography’ category to win the first-place blue ribbon and a $300 prize.

“What Allen had only hinted at, however, was that the artwork had been created in large part by an artificial intelligence [supercomputer], MidJourney, that can generate realistic images at a user’s command. The portrait of three figures, dressed in flowing robes, staring out to a bright beyond, was so finely detailed the judges couldn’t tell.”

Artists have been on the warpath after Allen’s win went viral on Twitter where it had backfired as the following tweeted messages have spelled out:

“We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes.”

“This sucks for the exact same reason we don’t let robots participate in the Olympics.”

“What makes this AI different is that it’s explicitly trained on current working artists. This thing wants our jobs, it’s actively anti-artist.

We’ve just gotten acquainted with Deep Blue, Watson, and Midjourney. Now, let’s meet GPT-3, the third generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This neural network machine has learned the nuts and bolts of natural language by “analyzing thousands of digital books, the length and breadth of Wikipedia, and nearly a trillion words posted to blogs, social media and the rest of the internet” Cade Metz wrote in The New York Times.  This means GPT-3 can tweet, write poetry, summarize emails, answer trivia questions (remember Watson?), translate languages, write computer programs, and even blog and argue. As a blogger myself, to that last one: Tsk tsk.

In one test, Metz wrote that GPT-3 showed it could imitate the writings of public figures. Topic: “How do we become more creative?” Imitated writer: Scott Barry Kaufman, pop psychologist. The opening lines of the GPT-3 piece I am excerpting below:

“I think creative expression is a natural byproduct of growing up in a diverse world. The more diverse the world is, the more you get exposed to different people, to different opportunities, to different places, and different challenges…”

As a writer myself, what has caught my eye in GPT-3 piece above is its use of a rhetorical device -- repetition. One book on writing stressed: “Good writers may repeat keywords or phrases to reinforce ideas and emotions, to establish a rhythm.”

When the real Kaufman read the whole GPT-3 piece, it stunned him. “It definitely sounds like something I would say,” he tweeted. “Crazy accurate AI.”

I wrote in my past ATABAY article “Scam Can Happen Anytime Anyplace to Anyone” about the scammer who used my FB identity. My niece engaged the scammer in a brief chat which I am excerpting below:

Scammer: I couldn’t believe it until I got the grant delivered to my doorstep too. I got $75,000 after I applied and it doesn’t need to be paid back and everyone is eligible to apply for this opportunity.

My niece: Where do you live now?

Scammer: Should I share with you the link to the attorney in charge so that you can apply as well?

My niece: Wla baya ko kasabot unsa na sya. Asa man ka nagpuyo karon Uncle?

[I don’t know what it is. Where do you live now, Uncle?]

Scammer: I’m enjoying my vacation trip at Singapore. [Holy smokes! The scammer could understand Cebuano.] I’m just trying to share the blessings that God has done for me.

[Pronto, my niece blocked the scammer.]

Just as the GPT-3 piece stunned the real Kaufman, so too did the scammer’s closing line to my niece astonish me. It seemed to be like spiritually-inspired final words I would say. Could such a scammer be a machine? With the recent emergence of GPT-3 AI technology, the answer is a no-brainer. Here’s a more thought-provoking question: What will the future look like?

Metz saw the handwriting on the wall of the near future: AI is not a myth. It is the future. And it is happening right now.

The good news: lots of new jobs will be created that require a high degree of creativity and emotional intelligence. The bad news: AI will replace millions of jobs. World Economic Forum reported that 75 million jobs are expected to be lost by 2022. Half of all jobs today will be lost by 2030. For any working couple now, one will lose his or her job.

The one-million-dollar man-vs-machine question: Will you lose your job to a machine?

Head still photo courtesy of pixabaydotcom

HE IS MY BROTHER

 

“If I’m killed, I’ll be with Jesus.” (Ninoy Aquino as he told Charles Colson, smiling)

Never have I read a more consequential words Ninoy had uttered than the above quote that was, sad to say, tossed aside and buried in the dustbin of our nation’s history. Only when I dropped by the Booksale local outlet few years ago and picked up a thirty-five-year-old book did I stumble upon, by chance, such rare unsung Ninoy’s quote.

Not surprisingly, rarely has the secular media waxed lyrical about such sort of quote, like Ninoy’s words above, to hit the papers’ front pages and become a crowd-pleasing story by itself simply because of the name: Jesus. It’s a name, in the thick of sensational drama unfolding in the political world, deemed as without rhyme or reason. It’s a name tagged along with mystical religious conversion. A conversion in a life of a person so radical an experience that only the converted, like Ninoy, could have plainly uttered the name of Jesus in public in a natural manner.

In a chance public encounter, Ninoy met on an airplane Charles Colson, a Christian author of the book “Kingdoms in Conflict: An Insider’s Challenging View of Politics, Power, and the Pulpit” that narrated about the Edsa Revolution in a chapter entitled “People Power”  which contained the following excerpts:

BORN AGAIN

“’You’re Mr. Colson,’ [Ninoy] exclaimed. ‘I must talk with you.’ Since we were blocking the aisle I offered him the empty seat next to mine. ‘I can’t believe I am meeting you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to die in prison until I read your book.’

 “Prison had, for [Ninoy] Aquino, the same bewildering effect it has held for so many others. He lost all sense of direction and perspective. He became bitter not only at Marcos [Sr.], but at the world, even at God. He hated everyone and his prison guards goaded him on. They sometimes put the dinner plate on the ground and let a mongrel dog wolf part of it down; then, kicking the dog aside, they gave what was left to Aquino. He lost forty pounds. He suffered two heart attacks. When he was not longing for revenge, he wanted to die.

“His mother, deeply concerned, sent him a book, the memoirs of another prisoner. It was my story – Born Again.”

“At first Aquino looked at it with little appetite. Watergate was poorly understood outside America. [As special counsel to former US President Richard Nixon, Colson pleaded guilty to charges related to Watergate scandal in 1974 and served seven months in prison.] Nonetheless, there were similarities in our careers. So Aquino read the book – and it touched him.

“Aquino began to search for the meaning I had found. A voracious reader, he poured over the Bible and other Christian books. He found great inspiration in a little classic, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. He was surprised to discover in reading the works of an early Filipino hero, Jose Rizal, that the same book had motivated his life and struggle for his country.

“One night Aquino knelt in his jail cell and gave his life to Jesus Christ. Overcome with grief for his anger toward God, he begged forgiveness. His viewpoints, his life, most of all his bitterness – all changed. He had a sense that his life had suddenly moved into a different channel with another purpose.”

In today’s personal conversion parlance: Ninoy was born again.

TOTAL SURRENDER

What does it mean to be born again? Taken from Jesus’ words, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again from above,” (John 3:3) and put into practice by many Protestants, it is the moment or process of fully accepting faith in Jesus Christ. It is an experience when Jesus and his teachings become real, and the “born again” acquires a personal relationship with God. Colson put in words his own “born again” moment:

“It was that night in the quiet of my room that I made the total surrender,” Colson started off his chat with God, brimming with deeply personal sentiments. He said that right after such total surrender “came the greatest joy of all – the final release, turning it all over to God.” And in the hours that followed, he wound up, “I discovered more strength that I’d ever known before.”

“This was the real mountaintop experience,” Colson rounded out putting the last touches on his conversion experience. “Above and around me the world was filled with joy and love and beauty. For the first time I felt truly free, even as the fortunes of my life seemed at their lowest ebb.”

GRAIN OF WHEAT FALLING TO THE GROUND

Like Ninoy, I am a Catholic, but had my personal conversion experience under a Protestant wing which I wrote in my ATABAY article “The Old Has Passed Away The New Has Come” which I am excerpting below:

“The impact of my initial shock hit me as hard as a heavy vault containing my vain treasures: good curriculum vitae, thriving career, stable job, fine family, beautiful wife, promising kids, decent community standing, and rosy future. In contrast with such ocean-deep personal showpieces stamped with p-r-i-d-e, my skin-deep intimacy with God then was a parachute style of relationship stamped with a when-all-is-well-who-needs-God escape clause.

“My torment in living through each stage of my crisis cast an image of the proverbial grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying – dying to my prideful self. What would I need the vault of treasures for when I was staring eyeball-to-eyeball with death prospect?

“I felt like falling into an abyss, groping for anything I could get hold of. All of a sudden, a hand, seemingly dropped from the clouds, reached out to me. It was a hand of a Born-Again Christian friend, Louie. What followed was a seven-year spiritual journey with my friend and his community abounding in spiritual growth and maturity: prayer, fellowship, worship, discipleship, cover-to-cover Bible personal reading, quiet times, and spiritual healing sessions, among others.

“Had not our leader Pastor Ernie and his wife Fe taken a mission task in a foreign land, our spiritual journey could have trodden a path, far and wide.”

HE IS MY BROTHER

Today, as a result of the recent fiercely divisive electoral process, we have turned into a deeply divided nation. The fierce divisiveness has reared its ugly head, to a large extent, in the realm of entertainment business: “Maid in Malacanang” crowd on one side; “Katips,” the other side.

Marking the direful day he was assassinated, both sides, amid such divisiveness, did spare no effort in flipping through Ninoy’s legacy.

On one side, Rigoberto Tiglao depicted an orthodox view in his column in The Manila Times “This Is A Hero?” Tiglao popped the question and ventured a guess: “Did [Ninoy] mainly see it as an opportunity to succeed Ferdinand E. Marcos well worth the risk of returning to Manila? […] seem to point to [such] motivation.”

On the other side, Randy David asserted a quintessential view in his Inquirer column:

“Ninoy Aquino’s assassination triggered a national outrage […] His martyrdom to the cause of democracy was immediately recognized and was undisputed […] people’s memory and appreciation of his heroism remained stable […]”

Ninoy, on one side, is an opportunist; on the other side, a hero. On my side, he is my brother.

Head still photo courtesy of Ylanite Koppens at pexelsdotcom