All of life in a day's news

The Senate was reported yesterday as having finally approved on third and final reading its version of the Freedom of Information bill. But before you stand up to applaud, here is the rest of the story -the House of Representatives is still ages away with its own version of the bill. And it takes the two of them to tango.

Also in the news yesterday, and on the same page at that, are these two stories: 1) Power rates down by 45 centavos this month, and 2) Gasoline prices to go up this week. What this tells us is that while someone is giving our backs a chest massage, another one is pulling out our nails one by one.

Still yesterday, it was reported that our foreign affairs secretary is confident we can count on the US over our sea row with China. Ha ha ha, if only it was not reported just a page away that China has again chased away two Philippine vessels from the Ayungin shoal, it wouldn't have been so funny.

The country has 23,153 new teachers, said the good news yesterday. Right next to it, the bad news about an association of private elementary and high schools asking for the abolition of the National Achievement Test because teachers now are just resorting to teaching their students to memorize instead of to think.

What all of this tells us is that it is truly very difficult to tell which is which in life. Sometimes you think that you already know the truth, until another truth hits you and you suddenly find yourself on queer street, not knowing where to proceed.

And it is not even the fault of the media, your bearer of the news, although sometimes the media can indeed be confusing, as in yesterday when a certain roadway was variously reported as a street and a boulevard, when in reality it was neither. It was an avenue.

But this is just minor compared to what one newspaper did recently. After running the controversial BIR ad that got so many doctors hopping mad, the same newspaper ran an editorial that criticized the same ad. If I may borrow from a certain feisty senator -- wha?

But yes, indeed, how can a newspaper come out with an editorial criticizing an ad that it itself accepted and published just a few days earlier. There seems to be something just not right when you find an ad good enough to publish and earn money from and then days later flog it as a bad ad.

Thankfully, that does not happen to all the media but only to a few certain types that cannot seem to distinguish their true nature and end up saying one thing despite being another. With the news getting to be quite disconcerting at times, it pays to have a reliable and trustworthy bearer of your daily tidings.

On the other hand, the media is not entirely to blame for messing up anyone's day. The media is only the bearer of the news. It does not invent or manufacture anything. The media cannot help it if the news can come in two colors.

While the conflicting or contrasting reports that came out yesterday were noticeable enough, there are times when the same thing happens and readers either just let the stories and their divergent imports pass, or readers do sometimes miss everything completely and just go on with their lives.

At any rate, it would seem that life is like that. Perhaps a greater director orchestrates everything to be that way, not to confound us but to challenge the limits of our ability to make choices, and having made them, to direct our attention to where we want to go based on the choices we make.

Just look at that one example of power rates going down at the same time that gasoline prices are going up. At first glance it would seem that our options are just getting canceled out. But from the initial discombobulation, one can find a crack in the wall somewhere in there from which to make one's escape.

I guess the point is that it is a maddening life but that we only get mad if we allow ourselves to be. Everything that happens happens for a reason, and if the road comes up to a fork, it is not the road's decision to turn left or right but ours. It is us who make the turn.

‘Everything that happens happens for a reason, and if the road comes up to a fork, it is not the road's decision to turn

left or right but ours.’