To heal a nation

"We find ourselves in a crisis so deep and devastating."

I yield today’s column to an excerpt from a speech delivered before new doctors of the state university by a good friend, Dr. Minguita Padilla, an ophthalmologist who as far as I recall, has been an active participant in social causes, from being president of the Eye Bank and at one time, organizer of Sinag, a People’s Crusade for Good Governance.

Dra. Ming is a consultant in two of the nation’s leading private hospitals, but is happiest when she works for the Philippine General Hospital, the public medical center of excellence, operated by the University of the Philippines from where she acquired her medical education.

The article was published in another newspaper, Malaya, on January 28, 2006, at a time when the nation was agog over the electoral manipulation of 2004 and the discovery of the so-called “Garci Tapes.” While circumstances then and now are not exactly parallel, the message of hope that Dr. Padilla then wrote about, still resonates in these critical times when a pandemic has ravaged the nation’s economy and rendered millions desperate.

“Imagine finding out that you have a cancerous tumor just beneath your skin. Imagine a doctor cutting you open and exposing the festering mass within, a mass that is gradually eating up the healthy tissue around it, eroding bone and insidiously spreading by blood to almost all parts of your body.

“Imagine that after doing so, the doctor sews you up again and then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, tells you to simply go on with your life, to just pretend the cancer is not there. And to all your protestations, he replies that he is the best there is — that he knows best.

“Absurd as it may seem, it is what the present leadership has done to us. If anything good came out of the political scandals of the past year, it is to expose like never before the extent of the illnesses that plague our national life. Like most cancers, these illnesses had been allowed to grow and feed on us for decades, but we really did not know how serious and widespread they were until we heard the “Hello Garci” tapes, and then witnessed the ruthless cover-up that ensued, a cover-up so shameless and so crude that it only served to expose more of the nation’s decay. Yes, we had always known we were not well, but only then did we get to glimpse the hideousness and smell the stench of what truly lies within.

“This would have been well and good if we had seen the process to completion, if we had been offered a definite cure. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

“And so today we have a people more wounded than ever before… And the saddest thing is that while the poor and ignorant have continued to suffer, a great majority of the “thinkers”, the people who could hold the key to changing our course, have been left more cynical and more hopeless. Because it has become too painful to think and to feel, many have taken refuge in apathy.

“Among the most wounded are the professionals: physicians, lawyers, engineers, teachers, soldiers and many others; men and women who have tried, despite all the odds, to contribute to nation building in the most noble way they can. Many can no longer stand to read the newspapers which have become sad reflections of empty, inane maneuverings of politicians and bureaucrats, actors in a mad play who can no longer address our true problems because they too are trapped within a system where only the wily can survive, and where noble dreams and aspirations are shot down by a culture of corruption that we are expected to accept as “realpolitik”, Filipino style.

“But as in all things, any excess is eventually met with the universal need to restore balance. And so like the proverbial “darkest night” that always comes before the dawn, Iknow in my heart that our dawn is fast approaching.

“One of the principles healers have known since ancient times is that one cannot effectively heal unless one is healed himself. The Navajo medicine man and woman call this the “good belly”. Unless one feels whole and good in the “gut”, one cannot heal another. This principle will always hold true. But in a country of the walking wounded, how does one heal?

“First, we must accept and recognize the disease. We have a serious cancer eating up our nation from within. It has been there for a long time, a variant of the same cancer Rizal spoke of over a hundred years ago. It cannot be cured by the opium of athletic victories or the diversionary burlesque called charter change. No less than a skilled surgical excision of the bulk of the tumor will be necessary to help in our healing. And while we ordinary men and women are not capable of such a surgical excision, we can help by starting what we in medicine call the “adjuvant” therapy. In short, rather than just pull our hair and wait for a hole to suddenly open up and swallow the majority of our politicians, we can do something…

“Rather than feel helpless, we can choose to be instruments not just of physical healing, but of hope. “Big Medicine” is what we must practice. Like the “babaylan” of our ancestors, let us not limit ourselves to the physical because this is not what our times call for. Our people are in desperate need of inspiration, of something and someone to believe in amidst all the confusion, the treachery, the lies, the deception, the betrayal all around them…

“In a country where apathy and cynicism abound. Let us show empathy and compassion. While corruption seems to have penetrated every nook and cranny of our government and its institutions, let our clinics and offices be havens of honesty and integrity. And while honor seems to have disappeared from the Filipino vocabulary, let us show them just how much they can trust us with their lives. As long as the nobility of our profession remains, then there is hope.

“We are all UP graduates. We are our people’s scholars, and they look to us for healing. Never have our people been as wounded as they are today. Go then and heal the nation.”

**

Postscript: While the times then and now are different and the main issues somewhat dissimilar, we find ourselves in a crisis so deep and devastating, while our health system is led by someone more of a politician than a medical professional.

Dra. Minguita Padilla’s words in 2006 resonate in these parlous times, but rather than “just pull our hair and wait for a hole…to swallow the majority of our politicians,” she chooses to hope, she and many of us await the dawn that comes after the darkest night, so that united, we can heal our nation.