Heads in the sand!

Since recent past, there’s the troubling dearth of leadership and vision. Hoping to rekindle deliberative discussion but there’s the seeming derailing element of pitiful breadth of perception on issues of substance.

The elected elite has buried its head in the quicksand of dystopian mañana—where nothing has worked, isn’t working and will never work—longing for soft illusions of miracles.

Why limit it to patch-up jobs when there’s the more lasting option of realistic paradigms? Don’t we have the fortitude to proactively do what’s right, ably capable of reading serious situational issues over playing into the hands of brinkmanship? Have we done anything decisive to improve the financial and fiscal crises that could bring the CNMI to its knees, if not already? Or have we accepted this inadequacy as the new norm, setting up the multitude for more unsolicited hardship?

Troubling the vacuum created by the lack of leadership that has metastasized—spread like Stage 4 cancers in vicious hardship—all over the archipelago. The silence is eerily deafening and you wonder why the lights are on but nobody’s home. We could only detect quick fearful shadows throughout the rooms and the backyard. Remember the film The Day After Tomorrow?

We could only suspect living within the parameters of comfort zones as to effectively allow paralysis of the thoughtful process in what’s known as “planning.” This deficient attitudinal anomaly is bad all the way around for these isles. It amounts to complete abandonment! What about the fate of the villagers the elected elite purports to represent? And they want our votes again this November?

As we plow through vicious hardship daily, we are wary that even hope fades when one gives it all up like terminal cancer patients caving into fatal illnesses. Troubling! But the upside of hardship is that it solidifies our collective strength to endure pain for something greater than the miseries of rock bottom today. Though half naked we may be when the storm fades, we will emerge ever stronger to meet the challenges of the times.

The elected elite’s sight is seemingly fossilized on the cliff line rocks of amnesia, dementia, apathy, arrogance, negligence and atrophy, among others. The callous disengagement is humiliating as the bunch prepares to turn the last page of change in a chapter it won’t revisit for years. But then who wants to review an ugly chapter riddled with maggots of neglect? With persistent head dips in the sand, can they even look up?

Nostalgic journey
The loss of a brother (Frank) sent me into a nostalgic journey of yesteryears in the old village. Revisiting the neighborhood, elderly and young people we knew, familiar playground between home and the family farm; beaches and savannahs we swam, climbed, fished and hunted.

There was the dreaded stint with our late saintly mom who taught us how to cook, wash the family clothes at the washbasin on weekends, daily house chores, including collecting firewood and the nightly rosary before hitting the books. As the eldest two of 14 kids, we had to learn literally everything except delivering babies. We never had the benefit of an older sister.

Learning what we had to learn explains why I was very particular how my spouse cooks my meals or irons my wardrobe. I knew these chores like the back of my hand. Indeed, it was one long journey of yore we’ve treated as our “golden days.” It was the real training ground for life after leaving the front door of home.

My brother and I had the same career—journalists—a profession we accepted as divine appointment more so than that of a dream or aspiration of young people. It fell naturally on our laps starting out in radio in 1967. Frank started his radio stint in 1969. He filled every position I vacated that included news director for the old government-run radio station KJQR and staff writer of the TTG’s Micronesian News Service. Our jobs took us to every corner of the region, north and south of the equator.

In all our trials, tribulations, victories, and defeat, there’s always time to sing songs we learned over the years from nursery rhyme to folk music. Ironically, the four lads from Liverpool came in with their hit Hard Days Night we’d intone wherever we go as junior high students. We even sang it aboard a huge truck en route to and from Tanapag Harbor where we hauled 90-lb cement sacks for two and-a-half days (@$3 a day) just to help our parents supplement the family diet.

Music seems a natural for my brothers. I was in a combo since my freshman year in high school as a rhythm guitarist and drummer. Music played a key role in my bringing home the bacon to help dad who worked for a construction firm that paid $.33 an hour. Recalled jumping on the jeep whenever he returns from work to help him at the farm until well past dusk. We’d rush through weeding on sensitive plants that culminated in feeding our pigs and chickens. It was another means to augment woefully cheap jobs in private industries here. It’s one more scar on our legs and arms, permanent reminders of how we earned our dues.

There were times well spent at grandpa’s place in Oleai where the family meets on weekends. It’s here where oral history was conveyed to us from cultural tradition and language. It was a real learning experience that included cooking together and joyful singing and story telling with the entire clan. It strengthened the family fiber in what’s known as unity.

I bid adios to both my brothers silently intoning Lani and Just A Little More, songs sung when the bass player for my favorite Hawaiian group, Makaha Sons, died. Well, it was one fine journey I call “Our Golden Years.” Si Yuus Maase` mañeluhu, Frank yan Ron!