The Golden Cost of Silence
Reflections on The Justice card and its meaning at this point in time
Silence is golden.
As a woman, I was taught to smile, nod and laugh at hurled insults. These feelings quashed, reduced to fluctuations of a cycle, the call and pull of the moon. A bow of the feminine to the masculine with the rage of emotions kept under lock and golden key.
Silence was a marker of class, one’s position in the pecking order of society. Moving in private Catholic school educated circles in Metro Manila, you were to never be like Aling Bebang screaming her head off in alleyways, throwing out clothes and things, letting the neighborhood know about her adulterous husband. Everybody knew in whispers, in, but now everybody knows.
You can keep it all in. You need to suck it all in. You can never air out your dirty laundry and bring shame to your family, your community, your country.
Silence meant you were raised well by your parents, that you came from family of good stock as the cow that’s auctioned, measured in weight and health. How much of it can be eaten or bred off from to reproduce more of its kind. Humayo kayo at magpakarami. The world would benefit more from people like you. Not those kind of people. Never a hysterical, no class Filipino woman, who in intimate betrayal, tormented by the pain, erupted in anger and frustration, put everything out there.
As an immigrant, I was told that the American dream is within reach as long as you keep your head down, do the work. Down at the earth, never up. I look down, unable to see beyond the gravel that holds my feet. The nape of my neck burns from years under the scorching sun of the hamster wheel of the US work culture. I carry scars and open wounds from the lashes of the whip of just work more, more, more to pay the bills. Always bills. My head and neck sore from its unnatural position.
The head is not meant to be kept down. It is meant to be moved around to look down, up, side to side. To watch the path we tread on for wildflowers that meant the burst of spring, uneven surfaces, ravines that mean death with one misstep or snakes even. To see the blue skies, rainbows, birds that fly freely as well as the dark clouds that loom over, spinning, forming into a storm, reminding us to take shelter. To gaze into the eyes of a beloved seated beside you, see the competing swimmer in the next lane and catch on coming cars to stop us from cross the street.
Wonder and basic survival. Life and death.
I noticed I spent even more time in my days with my head down, staring into that wonder of technology that is both a conduit for wonder and basic survival, life and death. I am sucked into the world of videos of pet dogs doing silly dog things, blackheads and pimples being squeezed, sucked out of their fleshy prison, family and friends I’ve left behind. Photos, videos bring them all to life and give me life even across the miles. I update my resume on job sites, connecting with networks for opportunities, sharing achievements to mark my worthiness as an employable person, productive, not lazy, pulling myself up by the bootstraps. The absence of gainful employment, a livelihood, meant death and taxes.
I check the time and hours past. Why do I choose to be chained, sucked into this endless scroll and continue to keep my head down? I can see the world and life in the palm of my hand! In the comfort of my air conditioned North Texas apartment, lounging on our worse for wear, decade old sofa bed in the height of unbearable summers!
But do I?
There are many things I chose not transmit into the Internet, brought to light and onto the black mirrors in your hands. I was trained, conditioned not to share, to keep silent - smile, nod and laugh even if insults are hurled at me. There was pain, sorrow and inescapable isolation. I kept it all in. I sucked it all in. I never aired out the dirty laundry of leaving home to venture into the unknown. The silence was not my life. It was far from it.
The silence advanced the slow death of my soul.
In Biology class in high school, as we focused on the reproductive system, our teacher played a video of a woman giving birth. The newborn released from the cavity of the uterus, umbilical cord cut, suspended upside down by its tiny feet then spanked. A cry from its mouth, a sigh of relief, tears from the mother and applause from the doctor and nurses in the operating room.
The cry, a response to pain, I thought, the necessary mercy to trigger and communicate life. One is born into this world tasting pain and expressing it.
Without any coherent language skills, the baby cries to communicate its needs. I am hungry. I am thirsty. My diaper is full of poop. My tummy hurts. I need a hug. Parents scramble to figure out what exactly it is. The wailing continues until the need addressed, the problem solved. It drives parents mad with sleepless nights, interrupting daily routines. Even obliterating any sense of one.
In extreme circumstances, the babe muffled into silence. The noise gone. Life then a swift death.
I am the eldest of six, who had a hand in helping rear with my younger siblings. I remember my mother say you don’t always have to rush to comfort your baby’s tears. If it refuses all the demands of basic human survival, let the baby sit with whatever it is feeling, to cry it all out because it will stop at one point. Hold the line, no matter the gravitating pull of sympathetic parental instinct how excruciating the grating noise is. While the baby depends on you for life, it must experience and go through pain, emotions and sit with it. And express it on its own. The baby will grow up to become a toddler, child, teenager then independent adult with the ability to communicate and be understood.
Discomfort, suffering and expressing it aloud and visibly are all part of the process. It is part of our humanity. It is also necessary for survival.
Even a person with the desire to die, the loss of all hope to live, the body will thrash and fight to get air. Because the body is programmed, designed to fight for the essential oxygen. Nanlaban. Lalaban hanggang sa huling hininga. Until its ultimate silence…death.
It may silence one. But the death of one is the pain of many.
Golden yellow links under the sailor collars of our school uniform caught the light and my attention. On my classmates’ necklaces hung equally golden pendants of the Virgin Mary, arms out stretched for a warm embrace. They wore it through sun, rain and even acrid sweat after P.E. class or childish horseplay after the bell rung to signal the school day was over. They never tarnished.
I’ve always wanted one. At the malls, I ogled at the sparkling jewelry store window displays, peering at the fingertip sized paper tags that were tied onto the pieces. The prices, at least five digits long, scribbled by hand.
The saleslady said it was gold. I held the two different necklaces in my hand - the more expensive one heavier than the other. In my gut, I knew it wasn’t real gold. She wasn’t a precious metals expert, no authority to prove and certify the authenticity of the gold necklace dangled in front of me. She needed to make a sale from which she would maybe get a commission. Or just a job well done for the day.
But I really wanted it to be. Maybe gold could be cheaper. I imagined the necklace on me, thinking I’d be like them. I gave the saleslady my trust and money. I could never afford the real deal, so I settled. I strung an aluminum medallion of Our Lady and a crystalline orb on my chain, a wisp of precious metal, around my neck.
I wore the necklace everyday through sun, rain and sweat, mimicking my golden tagged classmates. I stared at my image in the mirror and noticed a red rash that paralleled the line of the necklace. Maybe it’s just the tropical heat and humidity. I bent my neck side to side to give it a discrete scratch. I searched our medicine cabinet for an ointment to relieve the itch, rubbed it over again and again as instructed by its packet. The redness progressed into tiny bumps. I gritted my teeth through the discomfort.
And yet the necklace remained.
A friend pointed out the rash, I smiled and shrugged it off. Then another took notice of it. So one day, I removed the necklace. The sheen dulled. The yellow gold now tinged with flecks of muddied green. My gut was right all along. I suffered in silence for weeks, sitting with the decision I made. But now, the pain was too much to bear.
Dare I return to the store, wag the fake gold necklace in the face of the saleslady, point out how she duped me and demand from her boss for her to be fired? But wait, do I even have the financial capabilities as a high school student to launch a legal tirade on this transgression? Why does the government allow these fake products allowed to be sold? Or do I accept defeat that I was swallowed by the intense desire to belong? Do I acknowledge that my perfectly rational faculties failed me?
The only way is to move forward. I kept it all in, sucked it all in, removed that dirty necklace, shelved it and the rash went away. No more, never again. I still do not trust myself as able to buy a real gold necklace. I do not own one, despite the twinkle in my eye and a tickle in my belly whenever I cross paths with a jewelry store.
Why is gold so expensive anyway?
This element extracted from rocks in carved out mountains and panned from rivers by men encrusted in dust and sweat, then sorted and separated, milled and melted. We forget about all the men and women who touched this precious metal. We never will know their names, see their homes, hear their about their hopes and dreams. We forget about how once majestic peaks, home to many a flora and fauna, are hollowed out or crystal streams, source of refreshment and tool for cleansing, are now poisoned.
The pain - the screams and wails as dense stone falls on a foot or thousand degree kiln kisses the flesh or an entire mountain collapses into themself - forged and formed into these beautiful things of our consciousness that hypnotize our imagination, spur our lust for riches, status and power.
The golden silence we carry with us around our necks, wrapped on our wrists and fingers. Their pain contained, galvanized into commodity. These objects without voice, yet we feel this weight against our skin, heavy and cold as their silence and death.
A few days ago, Filipinos around the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law by dictator Ferdinand Marcos. That day was a dark day for freedoms of the populace, where civil law, writ of habeas corpus, civil rights by revoked. Curfews implemented with an iron hand. Media outlets silenced. Journalists, lawyers, doctors, activists, religious workers and farmers by the thousands were tortured and killed. Many disappeared without a trace, but with cause of speaking against the tyranny of the Marcos government.
A few days ago, now President, son of the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, was allowed with diplomatic immunity as well as an extension to his $353 Million contempt charge, to step into the halls of the UN General Assembly and speak before the leaders of the world. US President Biden also tweeted a photo of them meeting, speaking of the relationship “rooted in democracy, common history, and people-to-people ties.”
This made me reflect about The Justice card of the tarot. The 11th card of the 22 card Major Arcana, that is the midpoint of the fool’s journey. Midway one looks to the past, to what’s transpired and, hopefully, learned before moving into the future with accountability in response to the decisions at hand.
The traditional Rider Waite Smith (RWS) card centers on Lady Justice, seated on a throne between two pillars, in her hand - a two-edged blade, perfectly upright and straight, and in the other, scales suspended in perfect balance. When pulled in a reading, she stands for everything that you know Justice to be - honesty, fairness, balance and the law.
Behind Lady Justice is a purple curtain, that shields us from view of what else is bathed in yellow light behind her. What else is behind the law? Or who else is?
Like the gold we carry on our body parts, tucked inside jewelry boxes or hidden, locked in safety in banks, we will never know on whose backs these shiny objects were dug out from earth and stone, forged and shaped by fire. Or do we just turn a blind eye to them, refuse to truly see the blood and sacrifices made?
There is something to be said about laws grown from seeds inculcated by culture of silence in community. One that carries all the pain inside. One that deems such silence a marker of stature in society. One that exhorts you to keep your head down at all times.
This is not the same silence that The Hermit asks of us.
After our liberation from the dictator and his family, we were gifted with a supposedly fertile ground for growth, blessed by the blood, bone and ashes of the thousands martyrs, who were tortured and killed for their silence. But instead, a pyre built over three decades after their downfall, lighted by a match of poverty and discontent with the status quo, and fueled by the swift and steady winds of the unregulated arena of disinformation on the Internet, manipulated for personal gain.
For gold.
But is this the same gold, precious and pure, that was thrust into our faces and sold as highly prized and valued? Or have we convinced ourselves, like I did in my wide-eyed, naive youth, that this was not the true gold we seek, but one that corrodes and tarnishes when tested by the elements and time? Were we, as a people, as a nation, pandered into choosing fool’s gold?
We were all both enablers and victims of the complicity that we’ve chosen in the past. Now the past is the present once more.
Yet, Justice, the midway, the middle card of the Major Arcana, calls on us to reflect on the past. How do we move forward into the future knowing all this? How do we act in response to what’s happened in this more recent past? Do we continue to breathe and move in silence, the weight of it on our aching backs and conscience, the very thing that would breathe life for a few, but bring about the death of thousands, even millions?
I do not know the answer, the response. I think about the meaning of Justice, and ask does it even truly exist on this plane?
I turned to the books and found comfort in the words of Benebell Wen, a practicing corporate lawyer herself and tarot practitioner, when she talked the Justice card in her tome, “Holistic Tarot.” She explained
“Note further what the nature of the justice is: it is human-created justice, not divine justice. The laws of man are at play, not the laws of nature or the laws of the divine.”
The laws that govern us all are but made by us, can be undone and rewritten again and again to the benefit of its makers.
There is something to be said about a movement - an expression of the intense desire of millions, from all walks of life, to pull out money from their own pockets to support good governance and genuine public service. We want it that bad. We know and believe we deserve it. A drop in the bucket against the raging waters of the pressure from the political machinery of the moneyed interest of a few.
Brittany Muller, author of “The Contemplative Tarot: A Christian Guide to the Cards” explains that the Justice card is anchored on something bigger than the concept of Justice. That to be just is to love our neighbors, most especially the poor and the vulnerable. True Justice is not about care for self, but about care for others. It is not a one time event, but a constant reflection and sustained action.
We underestimate the power of a single drop of water. How a steady drip can chip off the hardest of stone and reform it into something else, more beautiful unrecognizable. A drip, drip, drip that will one day make a dent.
Because though silence may be golden, there is something else more precious: Love. The radical kind. Because water even in scant amounts brings hope. And with hope, there is love and life, not just for a few, but for many.
What you need to inhale if you want to know more about Martial Law in the Philippines, so that one will #NeverForget:
“Kingmaker” available on Showtime. You can also buy your copy on Amazon Prime.
“Some are Smarter than Others: The History of Marcos’ Crony Capitalism” by Ricardo Manapat. I read the inventory of the jewelry of Imelda Marcos and was appalled by it.
“The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos” the unfinished but essential work by Primitivo Mijares, who disappeared in 1977 aboard a flight from Guam to the Philippines with General Fabian Ver.
“Liway” a biographical film on the true story of anti-Marcos dissident Commander Liway, Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, as told by her son, director Kip Oebanda, who spent time in prison with his mother as a child.