It’s easier to curse than to cure

‘Cursing The Darkness Again! Cursing The Candle Too’

If so, may the Curse be with you! Since I’m not a doctor, don’t be surprised I’m studying curses, not cures. And for a very practical reason too: It’s easier to curse than to cure.

In 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the United Nations General Assembly, and Adlai Stevenson said of her: ‘She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world’ (phrases.org.uk). The man knew the lady knew better.

Darkness is a metaphor for ignorance or evil. Don’t fall for the metaphor. Andrew Aguecheek says: The advice given is, ‘if something is wrong, do something about it rather than complain’ (everything2.com). Right. But Andrew, it’s easier to complain.

The original Chinese proverb is:
Don’t curse the darkness – light a candle.

Some original Franciscan proverbs are:
Don’t curse the darkness – light candles. Not just one.
Don’t curse the darkness – someone may be listening.
Don’t curse the darkness – it’s not a good. No competing product will benefit from your efforts.
Don’t curse the darkness – everybody is doing it. Unless of course you’re one of the teeming masses, one of their kind, a college graduate of a prestigious university who is a respected professional and yet is nothing but a run-of-the-mill citizen with a dark, un-illuminated mind.

On second thought, I prescribe that you curse the darkness:
(1) If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to call attention to yourself.
(2) It’s safe. Nobody can recognize you even as you spit venom.
(3) If there are thirteen of you and you can’t decide who to light the candle.
(4) It’s a powerful remedy for aches & pains, as it takes your attention away from them.
(5) If you’re with people as in a theatre, you have a captive audience.

Remember: However you curse, don’t forget to curse the candle – because it’s good for the candle industry. That’s elementary marketing, isn’t it? Negative publicity is positive publicity – it positively results in sales.

You don’t have to speak to curse someone; just be yourself. Your selfish self. ‘Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race’ – William Ewart Gladstone.

But forewarned is forearmed: Cursing can be dangerous to your health. In the Philippines, a European-schooled Filipino gentleman named Jose Rizal cursed the friars in 1887 March by coming out with a book – Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not); for me, the best English translation is that by Ma Soledad Lacson-Locsin, 1996, Makati City: Bookmark, 601 pages – describing what he considered the social cancer in the Philippine islands under the Spanish colonizers. The friars ganged on him, haunted him, caught him, hanged him.

Most Philippine scholars, foreigners and Filipinos, more often than not point to the Noli, as the book is often referred to, as Rizal’s peroration damning the Roman Catholic Church. They’re right; it is so – but most fail to point out that the Noli does not represent Rizal’s essential views on the Church. The Church is Roman Catholicism; the Noli denigrates not the theory (or belief) of Catholicism but the practice of it, the bad, badder, baddest examples of it.

For the love of me, I can’t find a passage that speaks of a good priest in the Noli. With the Noli, Rizal cursed Roman Catholicism as practiced in the Philippines; that is why even the old Filipinas (women) practicing their religion are ill-spoken of in the novel.

3 years almost to the day after the Noli came out and when Rizal returned to the Philippines, Father Sanchez of the Ateneo, who loved Rizal much, had this conversation with the man he had become (in the 1890 February 2 letter of Rizal from Brussels to Ferdinand Blumentritt in Austria):

Are you not afraid of the consequences of your audacity?
Father, you are a missionary. If you go on your mission, are you not afraid of the consequences of its fulfillment?
Oh, that is entirely different!
Not at all. Your mission is to baptize the heathen, but mine is to make men worthy.

But JR, you don’t make men worthy by cursing.

I know many Filipinos curse Filipinos here and abroad at the drop of a hat. I forgive them all, hundreds of thousands of them. I forgive them their ignorance. Perhaps they don’t realize that cursing is not a good habit because they are exercising their vocal chords only, not their brains.

Do you curse those countries who have high population growth rates like the Philippines? You mean you haven’t learned the lesson that Japan and European countries have learned about lowering population growth: population is society, a given; it is not the problem. The one who believes that population is the problem is part of the problem!

When you curse the poor for being poor, then you curse the darkness. Why not learn from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and do something positive about it? ICRISAT is teaching them better by encouraging them to do more than those whom Jonathan Swift encouraged for less: ‘… that whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two blades of Grass, to grow on a Spot of Ground where one grew before, would deserve better of Mankind and do more essential Service to his Country than a whole Race of Politicians put together’ (quoted by Lee Jaffe, 1998, from Gulliver’s Travels, jaffebros.com). The ICRISAT advice? Plant sweet sorghum. Sweet sorghum is a crop that grows where none grows at all, which is twice better than Swift’s Corn or Grass. In another sense, Swift might have been referring to politicians who thought they were doing essential service to their country if they talked about it in a long Privileged Speech in the Senate.

Those who called themselves the Genuine Opposition in the last Philippine elections have almost always been exercising their vocal chords and not much the rest of their bodies top, middle, bottom. They have been denouncing quite a few people in and out of government in the media so much so we have become accustomed to their faces, not their facts. After all those years of practice, swearing now becomes them.

I thought only consumer products are sold by the swearing of individuals who are either popular or respected?

Curses, after all, are of many sizes and missions: Some may be brief, others endure for generations; some are casually rendered, others solemn; some are narrowly focused while others are broadly indiscriminate. And the ultimate success of a curse is enhanced by the social standing of the one declaring the curse. (Stanley Aronson, woai.com). We open our ears wide, not our mind, when the Big Mouths talk.

We Filipinos just simply say: ‘Crooks! Liars! Incompetents!’ We had 50 years of American occupation; either the Americans didn’t teach us the art of the insult, or we didn’t learn any. Some of us are poor teachers, some of us are poor learners.

‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s not polite to curse?’ Yes, but those in the Opposition make political hay out of it. And the intellectuals make academic hay out of it. It’s the stuff that consumers buy and want to buy again and again. Fat curses must make fat purses. That’s what makes newspapers, magazines, TV hosts sell.

They curse the economy. They curse the war. They curse the President. They curse the enemy. Those who curse are blameless. They are careful not to curse themselves, lest they be blamed. The cursers know the adage: Make hay while the sun doesn’t shine.

The cursers are un-biblical; they derive their wisdom elsewhere. In the beginning, did God curse the darkness? Not in anybody’s version of the Bible (Genesis 1:1).

So now it’s plain for me to see that those who curse the darkness don’t believe in God at all, no matter what they claim otherwise.

When you switch on a flashlight, strike a match, light a candle, you are separating the darkness from the light, and you should see that the light is good.

You can’t make light if there is no darkness – there can only be intense heat, overwhelming, annihilating everything in its non-path. A different kind of darkness. As in global warming: warm, warmer, warmest. Curses!