I dreamed a dream

Did the title remind you of something? I bet it did!  It’s one of the songs in Les Miserables, a very meaningful song which has already touched so many.  But if you think its magic has put only those who have seen the musical in a trance you’re wrong, because I dreamed a dream has awakened many more souls through a rendition by Susan Boyle. Find out why and how.  Here’s the song with its newest sensational singer:

There was a time when men were kind,
And their voices were soft,
And their words inviting.
There was a time when love was blind,
And the world was a song,
And the song was exciting.
There was a time when it all went wrong…

Please click on the link for a Youtube video of the song by Susan Boyle:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die,
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
Then I was young and unafraid,
And dreams were made and used and wasted.
There was no ransom to be paid,
No song unsung, no wine, untasted.

But the tigers come at night,
With their voices soft as thunder,
As they tear your hope apart,
And they turn your dream to shame.

He slept a summer by my side,
He filled my days with endless wonder…
He took my childhood in his stride,
But he was gone when autumn came!

And still I dream he’ll come to me,
That we will live the years together,
But there are dreams that cannot be,
And there are storms we cannot weather!

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living,
So different now from what it seemed…
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed…

Earth DAY 2009

After the Earth HOUR, which prompted millions to help save the planet by turning off lights comes Earth DAY 2009, April 22, which marks the start of a bigger and wider campaign for what I call “Bringing Earth’s Green Back”.  The great call states the following principles:

As shown by the massive response to Earth Hour, it seems safe to conclude that our world unites in an aim to re-habilitate our ailing planet.  As such, together with my household, I call on everyone who reads this blog to contribute a part in support of Earth Day Movement.  To show ours, here are the simple things we do for a cleaner, greener and better Earth:

• Turn off and unplug all the appliances when not in use.
• Minimize the kids’ use of television and DVD by substituting watching with book/magazine reading, engaging into indoor sports, dancing and the arts.
• Let your tot put on shorts at daytime when he’s just inside the house to lessen the number of soiled disposable diapers.  The reason behind this is explained by the following facts taken from Wikipedia:

Cloth diaper-wearing children go through about 6,000 diaper changes. If thrown into a landfill, cotton diapers decompose within six months. Since disposable diapers are discarded after a single use, usage of disposable diapers increases the burden on landfill sites, and increased environmental awareness has led to a growth in campaigns for parents to use reusable alternatives such as cloth or hybrid diapers. An estimated 27.4 billion disposable diapers are used each year in the US, resulting in a possible 3.4 million tons of used diapers adding to landfills each year.

• Reuse papers and plastic bags.
• Plant trees.  As my mom puts it, “if one individual who has lived to be 80 years old made a habit of planting a tree  on his birthday, he would have planted 80 trees in his lifetime“.  What if each of us follow the same?  Could you imagine the number of trees we could plant together; and the multitude of benefits that come with each of them?

These are just five of the many other ways of putting Earth’s life back to normal. What’s your part? Share it so we could learn from you, too!

Each of us has ONE life to live. Make each moment count. In the same way, each of us has ONE Earth to live in, make it clean and green!

Earth Hour

March 28, 2009, 8:30 – 9:30 in the evening is the world’s observance of Earth Hour and Arvid Matthew’s one of the people in 1,000 cities in the world who turned off the lights to help save the Planet Earth and to promote awareness about the destructive effects of global warming.

For an hour, the street where we live turned black except for the dim flickers coming from burning candles. This reminded me of the nights when a “gasera” or traditional lamp was the only source of light in my grandparents’ house. Those were the times when darkness wasn’t scary even when the houses were mostly made of bamboo. A lot has changed since then…a lot.

Not only were the lamps forgotten, even the olds’ preference to hard work was brisked away by the coming of new age and materialism.

Perhaps, that explains why the turning off of lights now happens only once in a while and is now considered a great part of man’s history.

Valkyrie inspires Hitler, part 1

Since my job as a marketing personnel for Columbia TriStar, Warner Brothers and BBC through its main distribution company in the Middle East, I never had much time to critique movies anymore. Instead, I only now sit down to watch one when my one year old wants to sing and dance with Barney and Friends, Elmo and the Sesame Street fellows, and Psalty’s Children’s Choir. Thus, my re-discovery of Hitler through Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie was more like an accident – unplanned as well as unexpected.

Valkyrie is based on the true story of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and the daring and ingenious plot to eliminate one of the most evil tyrants the world has ever known, Adolf Hitler. According to the movie itself, the plot was the 15th try to kill the Nazi ruler. But that, too, failed. I could go further and tell you what I think about the movie per se, but my interest was diverted to Hitler himself.

Counting the number of attempts at Adolf’s life, one could imagine the intensity of the hatred that pushed so many souls to contrive plots to end the fuhrer’s cruelty. Once may be enough to tell a population that he is hated, but fifteen times is far beyond explanation. This prompted me to ask “what made Hitler, a Hitler? Where did his indifference come from?

Like everyone else Adolf Hitler was once a child, a beautiful one if I may say. In a picture I saw, he even seemed angel-like, innocent and kind. However, it belied the facts that governed Hitler’s childhood.

…to be continued.

Note for students:

*In Norse mythology, a valkyrie (Old Norse valkyrja “chooser of the slain”[1]) is one of a host of female figures who choose those who die in battle.*

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie

Living anew

Each year, we welcome the first of January with a bang, a dozen or so of old and new resolutions plus a hundred of traditions that would “as old sayings say” bring good luck.

My family’s not spared from these. For years I’ve seen my mom preparing a polka-dot duster to wear and a number of round fruits for the table while I and my siblings await the New Year’s eve jump that was supposed to make us tall.

As the years passed, I’ve noticed that the dotted dusters came but were only given much importance on New Years. The fruits were eaten and forgotten, while the jumps seemed to confuse than to amaze us because only my brothers became taller even though they ignored the tradition.

More than these, I realized that each year comes to present itself as a circle of people and events which, like history, never fails to repeat itself. The same seems more evident in our government’s affair where issues focus mainly on our leaders’ blunders and how by turn of fate such unspeakable mistakes are put on hold and consequently erased when celebrity news such as “Pacman wins” snatches justice away from our people.

As if national news weren’t enough, we’d hear bombings from distant places like Gaza echoing a constant cry for survival and normal life. While we see these mad portrayals on tv and read each issue on the paper, something still whispers a thought in my ear – while for a greater number of us life is as easy as choosing the best polka-dot duster in town, there are still quite a number that lives without any options at all.

This year, my family stepped into a new way of celebrating New Year. It’s a great change. Although simple, it created a fantastic memory. I hope that our country, if not the whole world, would see life and living differently, for a better year.

Change is inevitable so let it be a good one.

Happy New Year everyone!