Opinion
Posted on 08:22 PM, November 23, 2010
Capital View -- By Mercedes B. Suleik
Ave, vale!
Goodbyes are always sweetly painful. I never realized that writing this column had become such a part of me, that when I received the shocking letter from Vergel O. Santos disengaging me from BusinessWorld (along with other columnists, I was made to understand in subsequent e-mails) due to a new editorial policy, I was stupefied. Of course, no mention was made of the criteria by which the selection of "non-retainables" was made clear, only that they were keeping only a few and were opening a new letters section. Okay, ayos lang.
The column was never bread and butter for me, and I suppose if I did not love writing so much, and if I did not then think that this broadsheet was the most objective of all Philippine dailies, I guess I myself would not have persevered.
Leaving another column I had written for -- as faculty member of the De La Salle Graduate School of Economics and Business, for which I was one of the original mainstays of the weekly column "The View from Taft" (together with Dante Sy who took the first Thursday slot, while I did the last Thursday of the month, when faculty members were as yet not quite ready to contribute regularly) -- was not such a wrench. Since I had stopped teaching, and new faculty members were now contributing their articles, I bowed out. It was then that I started doing my own column, "Capital View," thanks to the late Letty Locsin who gave me this opportunity.
Having been for the longest time with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP, the Central Bank of the Philippines), and later with the Development Bank of the Philippines and the Capital Market Council, and still later as consultant with the Securities and Exchange Commission, my articles generally focused on economic and capital market development. Eventually, having trained on Corporate Governance and becoming a fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Philippine counterpart, the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD), I turned to my new advocacy -- corporate governance.
My very first article in June 2005 was about the ICD and its efforts to promote corporate governance (CG) among the country’s listed companies, which article was subsequently followed in the succeeding years with discussions on its program for training company directors, the scorecard system it had begun to rate companies in their observance of the CG principles, and cities that had begun to implement their own CG road maps with the help of ICD’s sister organization, the Institute for Solidarity in Asia (ISA). Unforgettable too for me was my second article on the newly installed governor of BSP, Amando Tetangco, Jr. (whose six-year term will end in July 2011, just as I am ending my column after 5-1/2 years) with whom I worked in the Department of Economic Research (DER) of the BSP in the past. Of course I also wrote about one of the icons of the DER, Mrs. Escolastica B. Bince, our former boss who influenced and shaped much of the policies that were advocated by the previous governors of the BSP.
I continued to devote my column to current economic and development issues and topics, including comments on the worst corporate scandals in the United States, which I considered basically the result of greed (referring to the infamous statement of the character Gordon Ghekko of the movie Wall Street, "Greed is good"). I also noted the phenomenon of the "Black Swan" and the theory that many of the unexpected things that occur, including financial debacles, are "black swans" come from the common propensity to think that all swans are white. (I also recall having written about a MAP-FINEX-sponsored meeting with Maria Ressa and Maritess Vitug who spoke on the role of media in the past elections, and when a question came from the audience about why they were not able to predict the outcome of the vice-presidential race, Ms. Vitug said, tongue in cheek, that it was a "black swan event, no pun intended").
I had also written about some of my pet beliefs about the role of media on society, particularly the youth, since it seems to me that the tri-media -- print, radio, and television -- and its latest form, the Internet, has contributed in many ways to the decline of mores in our present age. Violence, the uninhibited emphasis on sex, consumerism, and the glorification of the human body (especially through advertising...and all those offensive billboards) are among those "modern" developments I deplore. Perhaps because I recall that in my youth, society was more family-oriented, and there prevailed respect for Christian beliefs. Moral and proper ways of behavior was the norm, rather than the exception.
And speaking of my youth, I often got teased mercilessly by good friends about in effect revealing my age -- I once wrote about being trapped in a time warp, recalling movies and music in the springtime of my life, as well as writing about going "home" to my school reunions in St. Theresa’s College. Of course, STC was a huge part of my life and formation, and so I also did not hesitate to write about my favorite saint, Teresa of Avila, who in my opinion should be the role model for modern woman, since even in her century, she was the epitome of womanly courage, feistiness, intelligence, and spirituality.
In this connection, I also wrote about the lives of some saints among them: St. Paul, Christianity’s greatest missionary when the Holy Father proclaimed the Pauline year, St. Josemaria Escriva whose teachings about making one’s daily life a means to becoming a saint (with a lower case "s"), following St. Paul’s message about God’s call to universal holiness, and St. John Marie Vianney when the Holy Father again proclaimed a year for the priests, and how it is our duty to pray for them, as they, being human beings like the rest of us, face more difficulties in their efforts to be saints for us. I guess this affection for my faith has also led me to often quoting from the Holy Father’s encyclicals and messages (especially about his take on communication as one of the ways which must be used to form conscience and deflect the evils of wrong communication as well as the emphasis of all our Popes on the sanctity of human life).
This had led me to my strong advocacy for the protection of human life, and the fight against misguided attempts to solve poverty in this country by means of promoting contraception, condoms, and even "justified abortion," the proponents wilfully using twisted economics about over-population to support the RH bill. I had recently written about the "clear and present danger" of this effort, citing fears about how the West, through the United Nations (whose biggest voices are of course Western) is in fact promoting depopulation in the world, especially in developing countries...eugenics revisited, if we must be blunt about it. (I have therefore come to the niggling suspicion that this strong advocacy against the RH bill had anything to do with my being axed? Just asking.)
Of course, in the course of my memorable almost half-decade of this column with this broadsheet, I had occasionally gone on what might be my flights of fancy -- writing about some of the books, poetry, and beautiful encounters with some of the people that have been part of my life. I wrote about one favorite teacher, Sr. Josefina delos Reyes, whom we called our "jo" ( jo meaning sweetheart, after the poem, "John Anderson, my Jo"), my father, Victor E. Balota, in whose memory I had written a book about the lives of the first 12 Filipino-educated mining engineers who called themselves the "dirty dozen," and people I admired (written up in some books published by my friend, Bing Carrion). One of my most favorite columns was one I had written on Francis Thompson’s "The Hound of Heaven," my eternally favorite poem, whose beauty, cadence, and graphic portrayal of our Lord as the relentless lover and pursuer, resonates forever in my heart.
And so I must bid farewell to my dear readers and friends who have faithfully followed my columns, including those who have at one time or another vociferously objected to some of my advocacies. I have appreciated all feedback, positive as well as negative. And certainly, I sincerely thank BusinessWorld for providing me with a venue for my comments. As Shakespeare has said, parting is such sweet sorrow ... Yet, there may well be another morrow. Thank you all, and God bless!
merci.suleik@gmail.com
