Ripping up calendars

By JUAN L. MERCADO, juan_mercado77@yahoo.com
January 1, 2012

New 2012 calendars will now be tacked up and those of 2011 shredded.  In Year 153 BC, two Roman consuls then set January 1 as the New Year – for hard-nosed military reasons. Since then, various customs evolved since to mark the passing of five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.

Relax.  Besieged Supreme Court chief justice Renato Corona didn’t get a second more than Torio, our neighborhood beggar. “Time is the one thing given to everyone in equal measure,” Seneca wrote.

The optimists, among us, itch to see the new year in.  The pessimists would make sure the old one finally beat it.  “The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year,” G.K. Chesterton reminds us. “It is that we should have a new soul”.

Thus, some heed the ancient counsel: “Be still.” They give thanks in quiet prayer. Many carom into the usual noise barrage. As dawn breaks, exhausted doctors in emergency rooms will still be treating those blasted by firecrackers – and stray bullets.

On January 1, Catholics mark the “Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God”. “Mary is Islam’s most honored woman,” the Economist points out.  She’s the only one to have a whole chapter named after her in the Koran.

“Christians and Muslims see, in Mary, an affirmation that there is no limit to the proximity of God that any human being can attain…Surely, that is reason enough for people of any faith to feel reverence for history’s foremost Jewish mother.”  She is our fallen nature’s “solitary boast”.

Blogs are the new kids on Media Avenue.  Some now run individual yearend reviews, just as newspapers, radio and TV traditionally do. These summaries tally the past year’s issues.

“Life can only be understood backwards,” Soren Kierkegaard insisted.  “But it is best lived forward.”  Crystal bowl features are a standard of yearend media reports. “In times like these, it is helpful to remember there have always been times like these”.

Discerning the future has never been one of mans special strengths. How do you Crystal-balling is about making educated guesses of what lies beyond the horizon.  From today’s realities, one sifts the trends likely to endure – and reshape tomorrow. “In today, tomorrow already walks.”

Nonetheless, the drill to glimpse ahead usually reaches fever pitch on New Year. “If you could look into the seeds of time / and say, which will grow and which will not,” Shakespeare wrote.

“Death keeps no calendar” yearend.  Reviews list prominent individuals who passed away in 2011.  That includes Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” leader Vaclav Havel, the paranoid Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, computer whiz Steve Jobs to Fr. Fausto Tenorio, the selfless priest of Mindanao lumads.

Shouldn’t media do also a yearend listing of “unfinished business.”?

This is, after all, a country of few closures. We waffled on the Japanese collaboration issue.  Few were punished for martial law abuses.  Look at Imelda.

Among issues that 2011 will leave unresolved are: desaparecidos Jonas Burgos, Shireley Capadan and Karen Empeno, unresolved murders, such as that of publicist Bobby Dacer, SVD Fr. Franciskus Madhu, SVD to scores rubbed out by vigilantes in Davao and Cebu, the coconut levy, tracking down former General Jovito Palparan, etc.etc.  This lack of accountability will spill into 2012.

The year that was saw Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales whack a Supreme Court decision that blinked at Eduardo Cojuangco. He pocketed 16.2 million San Miguel Corporation shares, by dipping into levies squeezed from indigent coconut farmers. “The biggest joke to hit the century”, she wrote before retiring.

Did this Court crack the “second biggest joke to hit the century?  Voting 7-6-2, the tribunal ruled “with finality” that creation of 16 new cities, didn’t fracture the Constitution. All 16 flunked tax collection criteria of P100 million, average for two consecutive years. That’s set by the Local Government Code (LGC).

The Court cartwheeled repeatedly, within three years, over a "final decision" that had become, in its own words, "executory". “Oh No! Not Again!", Inquirer headlined February’s flip-flop.

By then, vertigo afflicted everybody. That includes the League of Cities. Its 120 members protested the 16 “upstarts” siphoning their Internal Revenue allotments. “League of 16” members were also strapped to this “judicial yoyo”.

Persisting emergencies uncoil below the radar screen during delivery or a day maternal death rates here are triple that of China. We won’t meet the Millennium Goal target number 6: to reduce by three-quarters the number of mothers’ deaths.

Under-five children death rates are down to 29 today from 59 two decades ago. That is still behind Malaysia’s 12. Many will not “comb grey hair,” as William Butler Yeats wrote.

Shriveling from chronic hunger is not the stuff of headlines. Neither are the 700,000 abortions yearly due to lack of family planning alternatives. Few fret that the country’s capacity to feed itself dwindles as the thin top soil erodes. “Reversing soil erosion will make fighting insurgency seem like child’s play,” the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali once said.

Don’t be fooled by the calendar,” our grandmother used to say. “You have only as many days as you can make use of.”