905, 657 reasons not to hang yourself tonight

[August 2007 issue of The Benildean]

According to the American College Health Association, about 44 percent of students were so depressed that it was difficult for them to function at some point in the 2006 school year. It also found that nearly 10 percent reported seriously considering suicide at least once last year.
Richard Kadison, chief of Harvard University's mental health services, said most students tackle the often overwhelming demands of student life such as developmental issues, parental and societal pressures, and economic hardships with "incredible strength and resilience." --CNN.com


Once and for all, with my rose-colored glasses on, allow me to step into the sugary cavities of optimism and pronounce that suicide is not the remedy to all your sorrows. Apart from resembling a chewed-up bologna concealed in a closed box, a suicide victim leaves behind emotional scars to his sorry relations and the stigmata of a perceived troubled psyche.

No matter how romantic happy pill-drugged poets portray suicide as (Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death—Keats) hanging yourself over a temporal personal crisis is self-righteous and screaming bloody egotistical (pun unintended).

With the pressure of brain-bleeding deadlines, vicious, children-wolfing professors and, may I add, leering discipline officers hounding you in the hallways, examining every article of your being which might (with their fingers crossed) qualify a trip to the “hell-hole”—one, sometimes, can not evade an un-Christian contemplation on suicide (Sister Something back in grade school insisted that thoughts of suicide, even minus the execution, are already qualified as a mortal sin—non-negotiable…not even with twelve rounds of the Joyful Mysteries and a cocktail of holy water and Mompo.)

I have had my share of emo-moments (complete with a noose and kohl eyeliner). But I discovered that bawling it all off until you pass out helps tremendously—you actually wake up the next morning smiling, beaming with sunshine like a tranquilized fool in a psycho ward.

Seriously now, I came to a realization that there is so much to live for—just by reading Time Magazine from cover to cover. As opposed to your shiny middle-class life, small children continue to starve to death in Africa—with desert vultures in celebration over a smorgasbord of their sad remains. In North Korea, people live under the venomous claws of communism with families subsisting daily on porridge and where school-aged children steal coal for alcohol. In the Middle East, people live with an invisible clock humming above their doomed selves—ticking second after second—as they lie in wait in a street corner, on a bus ride home, within the four walls of a school room. Then a bomb organized by some schizoid fundamentalist goes off, murdering someone’s mother, someone’s husband, someone’s friend, someone’s child whose sad story end up on some daily broadsheet which Mr. Self Righteous—as he sits happily on his lounge chair at his sunflowers-wallpapered home situated on the map of some democratic country—ends up reading on a supposedly glorious Monday morning where hours later he gets reprimanded at work for a deadline overlooked which will lead him to later fit a noose around his three meals a day-nourished neck and suffocate the life out of him.

This when he could have instead opted for a day-off spent pigging out on ice cream and purchasing a gift of a tie for his boss—something that matches the latter’s kitchen floral wallpaper (talk about true, cruel vengeance).

On nights when you just feel like romancing a ledge, maybe you should chew on what Ernest Hemingway once quoted, “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over”. (Sure, hotshot.)

Or perhaps, you could just shrug it off and think: Life happens.

EDITORIAL: Juan and the beanstalk

[August 2007 issue]

In her thirteen-paged speech, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo outlined the billion peso infrastructure projects lined up for the future alongside the public-works projects that the administration has already completed. “The speech was like ‘the state of infrastructure report’,” stated Bayan Muna representative Teddy Casiño. Moreover, he remarked that the President’s address was three-fourths about infrastructure but stated nothing of definite plans to take in hand the issue of poverty and unemployment.

The President prides herself on a fiscal-development proposal supposedly attainable in 20 years. Investments in intellectual, physical, legal and business infrastructures have been created as a resolution to boost business confidence. With such reforms lined up to yield a so-called better Philippines inching alongside Asia’s economic Goliaths, the country—by 2010—can finally be regarded as nearly first world.

A preposterous pipe dream it is, if you may, setting aside optimism we tried so hard to hang on to for who-knows-how-many presidential SONAs. Economic development is an essential prerequisite for poverty reduction, but reality is, not all progress is pro-poverty. Sometimes, politicos should learn to shake off the all the highly-cerebral dialogues on political affairs and get down to the basics.

The very basic argument of bureaucracy—for instance—has a considerable effect on a country’s income growth. The government, handled by a battalion of civil servants is structurally incompetent with ineffectual agenda-setting, and policies, and a mounting corruption within the system triggered by wrong mindsets and attitudes. The country’s burdensome bureaucracy is plagued with gaps and overemphasis on policies and procedures minus the consideration for the accomplishment of intended outcomes and results.

Along with what was aforementioned, a country’s pathetic judiciary and security issues also play a fundamental role in the economic governance of a country.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one illustrates a government spiked with superficiality. Behind the gala of ornate gowns and a speech on the impossible carnival of billion-worth infrastructures is a mum society—corrupting in the venom of its own poison.