Frankly Attempting Heroism!

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On Facebook, my son Jomar talked about the need of anyone who is a virtual career professional (works from home) for a logo, an identifier, so now I have one myself, the above single-multiple-image.

The composite image above, a Windows 10 accidental collage that I photographed Saturday, 05 May 2018, is now my logo, with the title Frankly Attempting Heroism. Not for me only; it is also an invitation to people to be today’s their kinds of heroes of the Philippines, especially in Agriculture.

Consequently, my revised acronym for THiNK Journalism is “True, Heroic, inspiring, Necessary, Kind Journalism.” Instead of Helpful, Heroic. Why heroic? Because our farmers have been using chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the last 50 years, they are now fearful to try organic fertilizers and pesticides – it will be heroic to convince them otherwise.

Here is a 30-year old story of heroes. On 29 April 1990, Dean Dioscoro L Umali of my alma mater University of the Philippines College of Agriculture, delivered the UP Commencement Address at UP Diliman; he was then the President of the National Academy of Science & Technology. He entitled his talk:

“Be The Heroes We Never Were, And Live!”

At the outset, Dean Umali expressed his trepidation that he was not worthy of the honor of addressing the graduates, saying:

I wonder if, in more ways than one, our generation may have failed your generation. How does one impart the customary commencement counsel, if the old have not come up fully to the expectations of the young?

The University of the Philippines, UP, already 80 years old at that time, had not grown heroes in the fields and forests!

Our profligacy in years past, for example, dissipated your inheritance of abundant God-given resources. Our once magnificent dipterocarp forests have been ravaged. Our rivers are polluted with silt, our coral reefs destroyed by blast fishing, our mangroves decimated and Laguna de Bay is now a dying lake.

We ravaged our unique dipterocarp forests. We polluted our rivers; we destroyed our coral reefs; we abused our mangroves and raped Laguna de Bay. We exhausted the fertility of our soils.

UP alumnus, I am inviting you to fight for peace piece by piece in the un-peaceful world of PH agriculture right now – pinned by the Covid-19 lockdown and unable to free itself from the shackles of medical dictatorship, political opportunism; puzzled by obstacles,`and unable to discern opportunities.

The heroism we need right now is the daring of an open mind, the re-interpretation of data & information in the open universe of the Internet, greatly aided by the intuition of Albert Einstein, and emboldened by the optimism of Oscar Wilde.

The message of my logo?

“You can be any WFH hero you want.”

Today, if you want to be hero for the farmers, you have to work within “The New Thinking For Agriculture” as espoused by Secretary of Agriculture William Dar, and which is nourished by 8 paradigms – your first duty as a hero is to surf the Web for them.

Be the hero you never were and live!@517


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