The freedom to make choices

By Ma. Isabel Ongpin
Manila Times Internet Edition

As we all learn or should learn soon enough as we live our lives, we have to make choices. Choices may seem frivolous at times when they entail the ephemeral, the petty or the lightweight. Such as what garments to put on, what television channel to watch or what item on the menu to order. These are choices with few far-reaching consequences for ourselves or anyone else.

But inevitably the serious choices come one’s way for which they must be recognized and understood. Eventually we are presented with a series of choices of weight and import that are characterized by long-lasting consequences which in the light of another day or in the prism of options available validate or invalidate our reasons for choosing. The effects of these choices have ramifications that reach from the past to the future either in admiration or condemnation.

Choices are based on values and principles that may simply be reduced to good or bad when juxtaposed to them. They may include moral choices regarding ethical behavior, adherence to truth, accepting responsibility and many other instances that have to be addressed by the individual as he or she lives life. Many times, however, the premises on which a choice has to be made are perceived to be clouded, onerous or uncomfortable, a situation that presents itself as a gray area hard to navigate and even harder to arrive at a clear-cut destination that is right and not ill conceived. When these circumstances converge one must be astute, balanced and firm enough to take the right direction. Ambiguity will not do.

Recent events have brought to the light the consequences of past choices, past directions taken. The world of business has had scandalous events where corporate leaders of publicly traded corporations have deliberately chosen to manipulate them so as to give themselves unconscionable and unreasonable benefits at the expense of their stockholders and employees.

In sports, we see the manipulation of sports events ignoring the principle of sporting equality for honest and true competition that arrives at unquestioned results. But triumphs have been acquired through the illicit use of drugs and other underhanded maneuvers that have since been exposed bringing doubt and criticism to winners who have taken the wrong choices devaluing both their victories and their sports.

Most recently is the news of the choices made by the German Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Gunter Grass. As a 17-year old he served in the SS, the dreaded and notorious German Army elite corps credited with the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. While Grass is not quite expected to have been an astute and balanced adult, enough to make a morally responsible choice regarding the SS at that point of World War II, a full-fledged German author of maturity, admired for his moral perspective and stature, was. That Grass, the mature adult, revealed his morally questionable SS service only now after much comment regarding World War II issues, is a letdown. While it is better late than never and perhaps a cause of grudging admiration that at this latter part of his life he comes clean and is ready to live with the consequences, it cannot be dissembled that he made the wrong decision as a public figure to keep it hidden from the public for decades.

Just as we have the freedom and the necessity to make choices, we also have the responsibility to accept their consequences. Life decisions that are serious matters either enhance or compromise our future. Would that in making choices we go by what we believe and can defend in the light of a future day.

~~~
non-nursing related but definitely a soulfood.