MY TWO CENTS’ – Progressive lenses, strong friends and family values

A writer-friend of mine recently posted on Facebook about celebrating her new progressive bifocal lenses. While this may sound mundane to some, bifocals are a milestone saying that, yes, you are getting old, and with it goes your market value as an individual if you were to listen to job counselors. Bifocals, some say, make it more difficult for you to see clearly, and make you slower on the computer. Suddenly, employment opportunities are no longer as many, and so will increase the amount and type of worrying about the future. How you feel at work matters less than how work feels about you, leaving you trapped in jobs you don’t like, which can easily not like you. The worry over happy futures intensifies leading to the proverbial midlife crisis. Your status as an individual is threatened.
In a globalized world where the need to shore up individual worth has intensified, contemporary western society has amplified this by focusing even more on the individual. This creates a dichotomy that unfortunately alienates, rather than integrates and empowers us. Even neo-Marxist Critical theorists in the Frankfurt School of social thought have long agonized on the alienation of people from society, characterized as a world machine that treats us simply as high value inputs in ever increasing call for productive efficiency.
 Thus, personal freedoms are held higher than communitarian principles. It’s easy to dismiss our communities like family, church, and friendships as useless commitments and fetters to our personal freedoms. The sociologist Peter Berger lists family as mediating structures that cushion the effects of functional modernity that treats us like pawns in the world economy. The Catholic Pope Francis calls the Church a field hospital for those struggling in the battle of life. Friends and family are what ought to make life worth it. It is only on the deathbeds of individualists that we see a lot of humanity, humility, and grace in the acceptance of family and friends, and the regret that more time and effort should have been spent in the family rather than the workplace. Must we wait that long to realize such things?
 Family life is often dismissed as a cramping of the style of the individual, with unnecessary rules and relationships that prevent us from actualizing ourselves. Often we hear many netizens angry at their churches for encouraging them to look at life this way, rather than enjoying the pleasures of the moment. Of course, that’s probably when you are young, popular, and sought after in the material world. But when we start getting sick, only the family is left to care for us. Therefore, family life and real friendships is where our value lies, and where we are valued over time, even when the world no longer values us.
Unfortunately, a lot has happened to deaden this value giving role of the family, and in a globalized economy the individual simply becomes an automaton, and when he or she ages, individual value shrinks. In many western countries, divorce rates are high and so are levels of abortion and other things that tend to value the individual over the family. Many western countries allocate taxpayer money to support children and care for elderly folks that families do not take in. State instruments like the courts have been turned into channels of further alienation and disintegration, rather then empowerment. Even here in the Philippines, go to any family court and three fourths of the dockets are petitions for marriage annulment. Contrary to the spousal beating and oppressions I expected to hear from petitioners (reasons I consider respectable), I mostly heard the lamest reasons like the lack of communication, the “desire to be free,” “lazy husband” to end a marriage and a family. These are things that can be talked over, but some lawyers are more than happy to exploit family quarrels to earn legal and appearance fees. Often, the individuals left after the family break-up are not happier than when they started, and secretly yearn for a time when things were better. Their worlds have become complicated, and the legal fix blind to his or her happiness. Dura Lex.
  Obviously, strong families mean less taxes to fill in the gaps of love, caring and support that families would have given. Family love means so much more than any state allowance or milk ration even from the best welfare states like Norway or Canada. Families are where love is first learned, and the selfless giving of self to others is nurtured. It is where self and mutual respect, mistakes are ultimately forgiven, and tolerance and service are practiced. Doubtless, families are human institutions and are not perfect, but neither are we, nor is the State, and much less the workplace. Can we ask for better laws and programs to strengthen families? They are still the most effective way to build a humane, progressive society where people practice the respect and freedom in relative maturity.
 Perhaps the bifocal lens means more than getting old. It brings a new, albeit more careful perspective in looking at the world. Suddenly, individualist pursuits like money, popularity and the nice car no longer appeal to you as much as the presence at the dinner table of your college-age children, the warmth of the bed beside your life partner, the blazoned sunsets and cool mornings. It sometimes takes bifocals to see these important things which actually lie in front of us.