Suffering part of our past

By Alex P. Vidal

“One ought not to return a wrong nor an injury to any person, however strong the provocation.” —Socrates

IF we look back at history, there were more important and famous characters who suffered worse. If we suffer today from persecution, prejudice, discrimination, poverty, let’s remember how some great names of antiquity suffered to death.

Suffering is everywhere and inevitable. Even around our home, we can see families who can’t afford more than one meal a day, students pushed to their limits, workers put out of jobs, elderly folk abandoned by family members, and migrant workers exploited by employers.

Scripture tells us that some people suffer because of divine punishment, some for their faith, and some to save others.

“And if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him (Romans 8:17)

Jesus Christ mocked and nailed on the cross.

Mary Magdalene stoned and called a whore.

Socrates found guilty of “introducing new gods” by a slender majority in a jury of 501 and forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.

Pompey decapitated.

Julius Caesar stabbed in the back by envious senators led by neurotic Brutus (“Et tu, Brute?”) and ambitious Cassius.

Darius severely wounded before being killed in losing Persia to Alexander The Great in the Battle of Arbela. Montezuma humiliated in his own territory in Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, by Hernando Cortez. Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo. The Battle of Acium. Holocaust.

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Love birds Mark Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. Ben Hur and El Cid. Pearl Harbor.

The Bay of Pigs. Gomburza. Jose Rizal. Andres Bonifacio. Antonio Luna. John F. Kennedy. Martin Luther King. John Lennon. Moises Padilla. Ninoy Aquino.

Bruno burned at stake by the Catholic Inquisition. Galileo forced to recant the heliocentric theory and spent years in jail.

Bloody Mary beheaded. Thomas Moore beheaded for refusing to solemnize the marriage of Queen Elizabeth’s father King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn. Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution guillotine.

Diego Silang and his wife Gabriela executed.

Dona Aurora, wife of President Quezon, and their daughter Baby Quezon, killed in ambush by Hukbalahap.

Alexander Hamilton, Magellan, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Rasputin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler all died violently. And so on and so forth.

Great men and women suffered humiliation and cruel deaths.

According to a Jewish editor, Harry Golden, there are at lease four billion suns in the Milky Way, which is only one galaxy.

Many of these suns are thousands of times larger than our own, and vast millions of them have whole planetary systems, including literally billions of satellites, and all of this revolves at the rate of about a million miles an hour, like a huge oval pinwheel.

Our own sun and its planets, which includes the earth, are on the edge of this wheel.

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This is only our small corner of the universe, so why do not these billions of revolving and rotating suns and planets collide?

The answer is, the space is so unbelievably vast that if we reduced the suns and the planets in correct mathematical proportion with relation to the distances between them, each sun would be a speck of dust, two, three, and four thousand miles away from its nearest neighbor.

And, mind you, this is only the Milky Way — our own small corner — our own galaxy.

How many galaxies are there? Billions.

Billions of galaxies spaced at about one million light years apart (one light-year is about six trillion miles).

Within the range of our biggest telescopes there are at least one hundred million separate galaxies such as our own Milky Way, and that is not all, by any means.

The scientists have found that the further you got out into space with the telescopes the thicker the galaxies become, and there are billions of billions as yet uncovered to the scientist’s camera and the astrophysicist’s calculations.

When you think of all this, it’s silly to worry whether the allegations of our critics will really change the way we live in society.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)