A Clarification of Values

Or The Attempt Thereof

BY APRIL ROSE FALE In August 27, 2008, I had a serious talk with my inner self about which things are more important in life: a recording contract and my own personal limo or giving up all my money to find a medical answer to the prayers of people I have never met. And world peace. Of course, this was all hypothetical. The limo was nonexistent and the money-well, lets just say I was a very frugal person. It was all a game. Literally. The whole class had to make some fancy calculations concerning our ages, ethnicities, eating habits, and vices, and voila!our days were numbered. Again, literally. The abovementioned factors allowed us to approximate how many years we had left to live. This was the currency. And the lot on auction was pretty interesting. I was never a drinker, smoker, or snorter, so things were looking peachy for me. But I was still bidding with very limited resources (about 81 years). That required careful prioritizing, and prioritizing meant two words that I always find problematic: wait and surrender. Should I bid on this now? Should I wait? What if the items I want dont get picked? While I groped for a noble reason why good marriage should not be surrendered in exchange for a cure for AIDS, which may not even be auctioned at all, my mom was delightfully blunt about it: Because you dont even have AIDS! After clarifying our values for the third time, I might as well have been looking at barrels of mud. With options like a law degree, inner peace, a starring role in a Broadway hit, and feeding 30 hungry children for a year, I got confused in no time. When several people started fighting over the steak (yes, the kind that you eat), I was certain the rest of the class was pretty confused, too. Six decades ago, C.S. Lewis wrote that man is accustomed to a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about inside his head. Today, it still holds. For example, truth being relative is becoming a mark of progressive thinking. We do not bother with basic true or false because we refuse to acknowledge an absolute truth. Instead, we follow what is academic or critical or fashionable at the time, however inconsistent they may all be together. In the end, what we have is a concoction of half-baked beliefs that doesnt make any sense and just adds to the overall confusion. While untangling our values is hard enough, popular culture makes it hopeless. Magazines that promise firm abs, firmer buttocks and great sex maintain a fanatical readership. In Philippine television, talent searches draw large crowds of young people. Many of them drop out of school. In a culture that worships celebrities, education pales next to a shot at stardom. For all my interest in asserting my individuality, I still open a web link that says Flat Belly in 10 Days, after which I console myself with words like natural curiosity. I knowingly take the bait. In

Tuesdays with Morrie, the dying Morrie Schwartz urged, Create your own culture. But for an age group vulnerable to peer pressure, going against popular trend is hardly an option. Contemporary thinker Alvin Plantinga said the worlds problem is that everyone believes in god and I am it. MY will be done on earth and in heaven. In its move towards enlightenment and progress, Russia abolished religion and published a national paper called The Godless. Its results were widespread alcoholism, disease and a collapsing economy. Russian men had a life expectancy of 59, seventy percent of marriages ended in divorce and the average Russian woman has had four abortions. Without God, anything is permitted, said Dostoevsky, which is precisely the reason why whole nations self-destruct and generations like mine walk around aimlessly. We cannot move toward anything without an immoveable point of reference. Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, said it well: I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate everything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different, relative, coordinates.

This essay is dedicated to Vaclav Havel, a man who was less lost than most.