How To Deal With The Problem Of Problematic Persons

BIMBO CABIDOG

Ever came across with problematic persons? How do you deal with their dilemma?

Everyone must have met them: in workplaces, offices, public markets, parks, bus terminals and train rides. They are quite aplenty popping up even at home where folks, tired body and soul, would just rather call it a day and settle down for rest.

The problem with problematic persons is their making a complicated problem out of a simple one. They are the proverbial ones who turn a mere molehill into a mountain, cry wolf when they are only seeing a mouse. They end up not solving the problem but creating a bigger and complex problem.

How can you not deal with them? Well, the better recourse is to leave them on their own. The best reaction is to not react, and just mind your own business. But they make it impossible. They bother, they nag and they pester up to the end of time.

So, deal with them anyway. How to successfully do so is amazingly simple. It takes three steps. They are: Stop, Look and Listen.

A friend of a friend of mine wanted to declare World War III because her child was joked at by playmates for having no father. Well, she begot her son by wedlock and brought him up alone as solo parent. The derision of her son touched a raw nerve. The mom was a ticking bomb ready to explode.

She suspected that her son’s playmates got the story from their parents who talked bad of her, behind her back. She treated the joke as an insult. Soon it waxed into an assault on her person who bore a child without a father. But of course, this was only in her mind.

My friend did not want to have anything to do with it. The issue was just about her friend’s child being joked at by fellow children. It was an innocent affair pure and simple. She wasn’t one to join in reading anything more to it, nor whip up stories out of an overactive imagination.

But the single mom wouldn’t let go. She could not sleep on the wrong. She will not be put down by folks who judge her status. She won’t let hypocrites who think they are clean and decent deny her the right to give her son a normal life, although nobody was actually doing so.

She had no other recourse though but to pester my friend (her friend) no end. She wanted to conscript my friend into her unilateral declaration of war. She could not bring the war to her supposed enemies. She wanted to wage it in my friend’s backyard by talking back even without being heard by the addressees.

The alleged offenders who happen to be just parents of her son’s playmates may even have no inkling at the trespass they were supposed to have committed. The single mom was merely making the problem global. The intransigence was affecting my friend already. So the latter stepped in.

My friend stopped from all other preoccupations to accord the problem time and space. She looked at the problematic person to find what’s really going on. Then she listened to her troubled thoughts.

And her friend just poured out all the psychological and emotional hang-ups that had been weighing her down for a long time. She held on no longer and let everything she had been keeping for years flow like pus from a painful swelling. Suddenly, she was relieved and calmed.

The ally in war that my friend’s friend needed was after all just a true mate to be with her along what she was going through. What she needed was someone she can confide to, who can in turn lend a sympathetic ear and share the heavy load.

What she needed was a friend in the real sense who could take his deeply hidden secret of experiencing hell with genuine empathy and deep understanding.

Many people are going through a lot. Instead of solving their problems, they make these monstrous. It only takes real friends to deal with the problem of problematic persons.

What Causes The Cause-And-Effect Thing?

BIMBO CABIDOG

Life is experienced through change. It reflects things or phenomena, coming and going, in a flux. Each state turns to another. The continuum of change defines existence.

Work defines a human being. The dog barks. That’s what a dog is. Each of those actions and motions manifests change continuously repeated from beginning to end.

The philosopher says that nothing is permanent. Deeds, situations and conditions pass. Being, now, turns to its opposite later. Thesis and antithesis, Hegel declared, lead to synthesis.

The world turns. Evening turns to day. Stormy weather becomes fine next. Turbulence lapses into calm. In the same way that no one remains happy all the time, suffering and oppression go.

The glory and the golden age of empires recede to shameful disgrace. Strong rule crumbles. The castle that towered for an age goes the way of its builders’ fate. On its once proud halls, decay sets in.

The old gives way to new, which gets old afterwards. Ending for one is beginning of another, which also ends later.  But through all these, life advances, finds new horizons, climbs another level.

How short is the time of man! Boast of his dominion and superiority stumbles on the truth that other spans of existence beyond his little dwelling place are in millions of years.

The moonlit and starry night was already there billions of years before the first Homo sapiens appeared 150 millennia ago. They will still be there when the last civilized dude is gone.

But why be obsessed with the matter of time? Yes, men enslave themselves to it. But what if they find out that time has really no existence of its own. One day, the concept of time may not even be remembered.

Nothing is constant except change. But something in every coming and going is not change itself. It drives change, as a physical law converts energy to mass, mass to energy, on and on.

What keeps the sun shining and seating day by day? Or what makes the earth keep on rotating from east to west every 24 hours? Science has all sorts of explanations that men hold to be true and inviolable. But it also may be possible that scientific explanations long held as truth aren’t exactly true.

They base on patterns for one, but patterns are being proven now to be unreliable in making conclusion, simply because they are themselves subject to change. Trust only what is actually happening.

A simplistic way to know the driving force behind change is to find out how it happened. If there is smoke, there must be fire. Change as an effect surely must have come from a cause. But ultimately, it will be asked: what causes the cause-and-effect thing?

Does reality happen because of human preference or cosmic influence? Does it care about moral standpoints, religious perspectives or political persuasions, whatever they are?

Cause-and-effect reality is tricky. But change doesn’t owe to any expectation. It is what it is, not in conformity to someone’s judgment of good or bad. It owes only to the force, and that force is life.

Independence Will Always Be True While Filipinos Care

BIMBO CABIDOG

People still ask: is their country truly independent? Some say no and cite reasons, or ask further leading questions. One of these questions is, “can we indeed be already independent if the vast masses of our people remain poor?”

Others say yes and prove it by political postulates, like the country has its own democratic institutions – congress and the judiciary, and the people exercise the right to vote and choose officials they like to govern.

In case somebody has forgotten, we are celebrating today the 121^st anniversary of Philippine Independence. This means that government has officially decreed June 12, 1898 as the day the nation freed itself from colonial rule.

June 12, more than a century ago, was the day Filipino revolutionaries hoisted the country’s flag at the balcony of the Aguinaldo mansion in Kawit, Cavite and declared independence from Spain.

Of course, they were still in the midst of armed struggle to overthrow Spanish rule and complete victory was not at hand. But this was the winding moment of national conversion and the tribes and regions standing under a flag as one people.

The historical fact is important to clarify some erroneous misconception. The figure 121 is not the number of years the country has become independent. It is the number of years since Filipinos first asserted independence from foreign rule, officially and formally.

So, if we are now indeed independent or not doesn’t matter. We are not celebrating the period of time the country has become independent. We are marking the time the Filipino people resolutely asserted nationhood in revolutionary struggle.

Independence is not a mere label or political status. It is a collective stand and assertion of the people at a certain stage of their historical social development. It was the announcement to the whole world by our freedom fighters that henceforth they hold their right to self-determination inviolable and thus entertain no more colonial dictates.

In 1898, as provincial uprisings surged everywhere in the islands, the Filipino people have risen to a course that was irreversible. They have given birth to a nation by a collective will that no foreign power could anymore crush. Nationhood and identity were etched in blood by unity and struggle.

Yes, the American imperialists would later come to subjugate us. But the aggressors were deluding themselves to think they could do so. The Filipino nation was already beyond killing, even if the well-trained and better armed US forces decimated hundreds of thousands of resisting natives.

The Aguinaldo-led government succumbed in defeat to the imperialists. Noted for vacillation and betrayal, it foolishly conceded to yield inch by strategic inch of foothold to the foreign interventionists who faked alliance, but actually wanted to annex the islands to their sphere of global expansion.

As revolutionary courage gave way to treasonous cowardice, the newly built republic ended under the bootheels of the imperialist aggressor, and for the next fifty years, the country heeded foreign tutelage and dictates. It forfeited a future of its own.

Subtract the 46 years under US colonial rule, when even the mere mention of the word independence by Filipinos would be prohibited as a crime of sedition. Subtract also the post-war years of a fledgling republic, when continuing political and economic interference by the Americans easily annulled their supposed granting of independence in 1946. How many years can we yet count as really independent?

When we assess the national experience in the years of purported self-determination and government of our own, has independence ever been a reality? There are cases and instances to prove it hasn’t – the continuing Filipino diaspora, economic dependence, debt slavery, and diminution of sovereignty by consent to the hegemonic intrusions of powers like China which is devouring the West Philippine Sea, and the United States which still bases military forces and assets here.

But what do Filipinos today really care? As long as there are folks calling themselves Filipino who still stand and assert for country, the trueness of independence will never be erased by any circumstance. Fear when the masses no longer care.