| 8 A Discourse On The
Grand Laws Of The UniverseImmediately after the mauling incident, our
parents' group boycotted the school and kept our children at home.
After a few days, without lifting any
finger to punish the maulers except for some lame and brief suspensions, the Philippine
consul general in Jeddah summoned me, as the representative from our parents' group of
school board candidates, into a night meeting at his house. A proposed horse trading as a
way out of the aborted election was discussed, among other things. Two from your side
and two from the other side. Take her out, take him out; we let him in, we let her in.
That’s our school board.
The consul general was plainly going for a
win-win situation. He kept on saying: "Look now, consider both sides of the equation,
try to look at things fairly", in an effort to appeal to the sense of fairness,
justice and equality.
Nothing puts me off more than a person
whom I consider to be working from a wrong basic assumption. Looking at both sides of the
equation does not have anything to do with fairness or justice or equality.
My Compton’s Multimedia Home Library
CD defines equation as "a statement of equality between two quantities, as shown by
the equal sign (=)." That is silly. If two quantities are indeed equal, absolutely
equal as shown by the equal sign (=), then you could not be referring to two quantities.
It has to be the same quantity, the same entity.
An equation is not even trying to equate
one entity to another entity. An equation is a statement of the absolute uniqueness of a
single entity, or the absolute state of the unity, difference, multiplicity, division of
several elements that you combine into a single entity. It is absolute. There are no two
sides here. And it certainly does not make any sense to consider two sides.
What about two men being equal, you say?
Give yourself a break. Two men will never
be equal.
This is the very premise why the death of
one American can send intelligent missiles raining down on peoples of another country
while the massacre of an entire nation in Rwanda will hardly merit a yawn from the couch
potato. This is the very premise behind the structure and functioning of a United Nations
Security Council that all of the free world accept as legitimate.
You can of course try to treat two men
equally, yes, to try to compensate for the inequalities.
And when one talks about inequalities,
"Look now, consider both sides of the inequality", then one is making sense.
Inequalities are after all what life is
all about, what constantly move and shift things around, up and down, left and right,
forward and backward, in and out.
The laws of the universe can be more
appreciated not by their tendency to maintain equilibrium and order but by their
propensity to cause and to effect inertia and chaos.
So it came to pass on that night that my
mind was paying more attention to the grand laws of the universe than to the political
bargaining on the table.
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