Signature Words, Struggles, Sweet Surrender

“Whoever would love life and see good days must keep… their lips from deceitful speech. They must turn from evil and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it.” -- 1 Peter 3:9

Words. We have a way with words, and words have a way with us. I often find a word that is a signature, in itself containing clues about who spoke or wrote it. For example, Evangelicals use the noun “gifting” when meaning “gifts”, maybe to differentiate spiritual from physical gifts.

Another signature word is “struggle”. Since college days 52 years ago, I have learned to use “struggle” as a “signature word”. It used to be a signature connoting “difficult, heroic, worth doing”, or “hard, kwela, romantic, like an elusive girl”, or “selfless mission impossible, like becoming a priest, a doctor or a lawyer”, or “paying the cost of being a man for others”. The connotation inspired many to use “struggle” as often as they could -- to impress peers and superiors or to brag about the gravitas of what they were doing.  It was a signature word often used by leftists, revolutionaries, ideologues, my classmates and friends in the underground movements at that time; they were the favorite of types like joma, dante, and some buddies like Omar and Tacking, as I remember them in the “1st Quarter Storm” season of the time.

Today, 52 years after college, five and seventy after birth, the end of WW II, and the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement, now older and wiser, I have abandoned the signature word “struggle” for good, and for good reasons, in favor of things better;

Today, in the golden, senior years, I see the “struggle” signature as nothing more than what it means literally: “difficult and futile”; “hard, useless, not worth doing”; it has lost its sting, its ability to energize and inspire, and has ceased to be relevant as a signature and symbol, even if it still means hard; there are better signature words now: like “Perform” and “Prosper”, words that invite a new template of Prosperity by Performance and forget how “armed struggle” suppressed our Nation’s prosperity for so long.

Today, to people who are still bewitched and try to mesmerize others by the signature word “struggle” and its twin “armed struggle”, people like joma, cohorts, victims, some wayward party lists, front organizations, above and underground, in the mountains, at Batasan Hills and wherever they may be -- I ask them to do the same: “struggle” is no longer KWELA; there are better things to do at this time:

SAY GOODBYE TO FUTILE STRUGGLES, 2020, AND DISEASE;

SAY HELLO TO PEACE AND EASE;

COME HOME, and as Star Trekkies fondly say, LIVE LONG, PROSPER!

Bob Calida, this first day of 2021, the year of Freedom, Peace, Ease, and Prosperity