Each Day is a New Gift

Why do we celebrate our birthday? It is to commemorate the day we came into existence, the day when we came, as Martin Heidegger put it, as Dasein ('Being-there' or 'there-being'). The day we celebrate our Geworfenheit (throwness). And, the day we started as an In-der-welt-sein (a ‘Being-in-the-world’).

If the purpose of celebrating our birthday is to celebrate our coming in to existence, then slowly but inevitably we are losing sight of the real purpose of this event. We think lesser of our beginning and dwell more on the time that is left to us. Every year when we celebrate our birthday we look back at the accomplishments we have done given our age, if we are ahead or behind, or if time just passed us by. It's as if our life is under a specific contract or like having a specified deadline --a life-span. But young men ought to think of death just as much as old men. Death is no more pressing for the old than it is for the young.

Celebrating our birthday isn't about speculating how many years we have left in our existence but about the occasion of celebrating the original event of our birth and to remind us that each day is a new gift.

I just turned twenty seven today, another reason to celebrate the gift of life. I say it's a gift because it was gratuitously given to me, not because I asked for it, nor earned it like a reward, nor do I deserve it. I may have moral and political right to life, but I do not have a metaphysical right to it. I cannot demand that I deserve the right to come into being or to deserve to exist for another day. It was given to me freely by a higher Being whom I call my God.

Always as an End

I don't know which is legal and which is not, but I do know which is moral. It saddens me that in our government's strive to search for justice, we have forgotten our moral obligations. Rights had been stepped on --the rights the government should have been protecting. It got me wondering how different we are then to the once oppressor who is now being oppressed.

Not all legal is moral, that I'm sure of. It is very evident in the event that transpired involving the former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The government is preventing her from seeking medical attention from a foreign country. Thus depriving her the right to life through her worsening medical conditions, and the right to travel to a foreign country. The camp of former President, repeatedly claimed, that they want to travel abroad for medical assistance, not to escape prosecution.

I understand why the government wants to prevent her from leaving the country. I understand the need to put her on trial, the need to put a dot on the alleged wrong doings she did. I'm not a real fan of Arroyo myself, but I understand her as a person. I understand her as someone who has her own rights. And if the government is acting towards absolutism, I will always react on that.

According to Immanuel Kant, all human beings should be treated as free and equal members of a shared moral community and that we need to treat people properly. What the government is doing to the former President in seeking out justice has become an embodiment of injustice in itself. The trial can wait, but her worsening medical conditions cannot.

"Act so that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means."



" ...man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. In all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, he must always be regarded at the same time as an end..."

-- Immanuel Kant, The Categorical Imperative