The Marocharim Experiment

Up the Ironies, c. 2002

Father's Days

By on February 28th, 2011 in Personal | 1 Comment

There comes a time in every boy’s life that as his shadow becomes as tall as his father’s, there’s always that need to prove himself. As days go by, there’s that urge for the son to be better than the father. I don’t know what drives that need – ego, manhood, or perhaps insecurities, but I wasn’t immune from it.

Yesterday, when my father turned 56, I gave myself time to think about my relationship with my Dad. The more I tried to stay away from the path he forged to earn a living for us, the more I found myself closer to it as I make a living for my own. I’m pretty much like my own father now: the same rank in the corporate world, the same responsibilities, the same lines of thought. The more I tried to be less like him, the more I became like him.

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Call of the Void

By on February 11th, 2011 in Current | 4 Comments

If we take former Sec. Angelo Reyes’ death along sociological lines, his alleged suicide was anomic.

The death, as things seem now, was characterized by moral confusion, emotional perturbation, social dissonance.  When you’re in the middle of a corruption scandal that reaches the upper echelons of government and the military, those descriptions are themselves inadequate.  It would be, as how Dostoyevsky termed it, a deep-seated feeling of toska: that someone so powerful, someone who built his career by the spirit of military integrity, would fall dead by his own hand.

Whatever reason forced Reyes to die allegedly by his hand is something we leave respectfully and with much reverence and deference to his memory.  What he left in the way of testimony and public interest, however, is something we should not leave in peace.  Justice should never be obscured by the veil of mourning.

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