Lusions

OK, Joseph, ‘lusions’ is not a word that you can find in the dictionary, unless you look it up in an etymology dictionary and you might find a middle English usage meaning the opposite of ‘illusions.’ It might have derived from the Latin ludere, which means, being playful (light touch rather than down heavy) with reality. Denial of reality, which, for purposes of alliteration, is associated with delusion, dissimulation, deception, dissembling, and deceit, might make one wonder why the word ‘lusion’ would have disappeared from our vocabulary while its opposite and a myriad of derivatives survived.

A psychiatrist friend says that the figure of 10 percent of population being in touch with reality is probably a high figure. That 90 percent, however, live in some form of illusion is a more reliable figure. I do not know how researchers come up with quantified figures like this but perhaps, the tools of statistical probability help by random sampling. In any case, casting one’s eyes around friends and colleagues, and more significantly, on one’s self, it is not difficult to see, if one were really honest, how indeed, the 10 percent “realistic living” people might actually be a high figure.

It is no surprise then that we should be more familiar with whatever reality the words ‘illusions, delusions, elusions and allusions’ are pointing to, for we might be more adept at their practice rather than that of their long departed antonym.

This is not a moralistic essay to judge common perceptions and contemporary behavior, though it would not be surprising were one end with such conclusion were one to follow this track.

Since the French philosopher René Descartes articulated his dictum cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore, I am,” humans mistook their essence for their existence, and started living their lives in their minds and imagination without necessarily checking with the reality factor external to them. Ancient thinkers did prefer the workings of the mind rather than the impression of the senses as a more reliable tool to assessing what is real. In the pecking order from the Indus Valley, the Brahmin, the scholars and the priests, were on top of the social heap. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, and Kung Fu Tzu in China, Augustine and Aquinas for Europe, would guide cultures and civilizations with their thoughts. In our time, the various interpretations by the “people of the books” (BTW, bible—biblos in Greek—that mainstay in many American living rooms, simply means “books,” not its “title”) of their accumulated traditions steers tribal paths and is wreaking havoc to the emerging planetary social order.

Our current White House reportedly had gotten hold of the imaginative power of the Apocalypse and Armageddon so much so that foreign policy decisions—economic and military—had been tailored to apocalyptic scenarios. GWB might have recovered his senses, which should have come along with his clean-cut haircut from the beginning, with his sudden Teddy Roosevelt conversion into creating as a part of his legacy, a few marine monuments before leaving office. Since I opposed the establishment of the GWB Presidential Library in my alma mater, Southern Methodist University, a single stroke of the pen on the marine monuments might restore him back to my good graces and might just get him off the hook in my eternal consignment of his presidency to purgatory!

Just so we are grounded here, here’s GWB on reality a few years back: “One year ago I gave a speech in an aircraft-carrier saying that we had succeeded in reaching an important objective, accomplishing a mission, which was to remove Saddam Hussein from power. As a result, there are no more torture chambers, no more mass graves.” (George W. Bush, 30 April 2004.) In the same month, the world was to see the photos of torturing in the Abu Graib prison, and the collective executions of the civil war between Shiites and Sunnis continue up to the moment.

But I digress. While this essential workings of the mind and imagination is a powerful insight in that it taught us how to affect people’s images and therefore, their behavior, we have also become captive of the prisons of our own prisms, building internal castles of feelings and thoughts without regard of the sensory presence impinging and abiding. Just look at our consumer habits and it is clear that our actions derive not from the basic requirements of existence, but on the essential illusions of the mind and the imagination.

The current economic downturn has at least, brought the “survivor” instinct back into home budgets. Parents are now taking their children to the back-to-school sales with the question: do you need this, or do you just want it because other children have it?

Recognizing YHWH (Yahweh), which means “that which is, is,” or as depicted in the Decalogue, “there is no other Reality but me,” the sunum bonum of existence is living in our lusions, and not in our illusions. The salvation we seek is not about being taken away from our current predicament or situation into another one; our redemption is to be freed from our illusions and into the stark but can-be embraced and celebrated light of day.

Being on denial is the current phrase to describe most of our behavior. We cannot seem to relinquish our leech-hold on the imagined golden age of the garment industry, with or without Abramoff and Tom Delay, and with all its known aberrations and cuddling of criminal practices. The INS for the last three weeks offered clearance and safe passage to almost half a million illegal aliens. Only eight took the offer, all eight still have to leave the country.

I was in Helena, Montana in the ’70s and noticed the high Hispanic population. I asked: “When did they come here?” Answer: “They were here before we were.” There had always been traffic from the Berring Sea to the Yucatan, extending even to the tip of the Andes, and just because the British and the Iberians could not see eye to eye, or some propertied gents out in Philadelphia thought of drawing a line on the sand so that they can mint their own currency, does not define who is alien and who is native in this planet?

Thus, we applaud Irene Tantiado and her helpless contract workers for reminding us of the Administrative Orders we issued that are lighter than balloon hot air, and are of no comfort to those who are waiting for something promised but are nowhere to be found.

And though it is depressing to confront the short-sightedness, and loss of nerve, or worst, knee-jerk responding out of fear and trepidation, of the legislature in “killing” the Sablan-Salas initiative to improve immigration status of contract workers before the Feds have their say, we shan’t despair. (BTW, TY to Tina for pointing out the public funding for Legislators who like to fish. I mean, really!)

Let us be clear of one thing. Like the almost half a million illegal aliens by INS account, the contract workers in the CNMI did not hock their body and soul for three years worth of earnings to come to these islands just so they can be our eternal bonded servants.

They came here to stay because we are the USA, and we delightfully feasted on the sweat of their brows, exploited their pocketbooks, and for some, indulge in our known propensity to imbibe in their pulchritude. All they are asking is fairness in a land where such virtue is a claimed and legally enshrined quality, and where the supremacy of federal laws so far have proven to be more an instrument of justice than the peculiarities and uniqueness of local prerogatives and privileges.

One more lusion: inspite of what some luminaries in the GOP are now claiming that the U.S. Constitution promulgated a Republic rather than a democracy, and that we should rely on the expertise and wisdom of the elected representatives and not on the passion of the mob, I say, maybe so, but after Abe Lincoln and MLK, Rosa Parks, and the Kennedy Brothers, even the libertarian Ayn Rand and Charles Reyes, and across the seas, Mandela, Gandhi and Mary Robinson, we are a democracy holding up as paramount the participation of the individual person (We the People, our elders wrote, not, We the Citizens) in the affairs that determines one’s destiny.

Did you notice that even Beijing is now singing, “You and Me, We are Family!”