A Clarification of Values--Or the Attempt Thereof by April Rose Fale
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A Clarification of Values — Or The Attempt ThereofBY APRIL ROSE FALEIn August 27, 2008, I had a serious talk with my inner self about which things are more important in life: a re cording 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, let’s 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: waitand surrender. Should I bid on this now? Should I wait? What if the items I wantdon’t getpicked?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 don’t 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 ofhalf-baked beliefs that doesn’t 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 t hat says “Flat Belly in 10 Days ,” after which I console myself with words like ‘natural curiosity .’ I knowingly take the bait. In
A Clarification of Values--Or the Attempt Thereof by April Rose Fale
