What Are Words: On American Idol's Chris Medina

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It can be frustrating most of the times to learn about what’s going on in the world, back at home or elsewhere. And when your day seems to be not going your way, it is all the more depressing. But then, there are moments when you get to pick up small bits of graces left like bread crumbs along the way, perhaps not really intended for you. And somehow, all the frustration and even resentment get to be forgotten. Stories like that of 26-year-old Chris Medina’s who went to an audition for American Idol.

According to his story, he got engaged to his girlfriend for 8 years. Before they could get married, his girlfriend got into an accident. She woke up from her coma a month later but with some physical disabilities brought about by her traumatic brain injury. In a world where men and women would rather thrive in a quick-fix society, Chris Medina took the right and difficult road, the high and moral road. He stuck with his girlfriend and became her caretaker along with her own mother.

“What kind of a guy would I be if I walked out when she needed me the most?” Medina said.

Chris was not obliged to stay with her. They were not married in the first place. He could have left her, live his own life and start fresh. The current rule of society is “Convenience”. If it’s not convenient for you, then stay out of there. And for many years the world has been trying to get rid of so many “inconveniences” and devise ways that can make life more convenient: Divorce, abortions, drugs, teenage sex, etc. For Chris, it was easy to give up, lose faith and abandon whatever hope that was left not shattered. But his story was not the usual story we see in movies or read on paperback novels. His story was genuinely and unadulterated personal love story.

His audition piece was as powerful as his own words. Singing The Script’s Break Even, he sang with heart and soul, “What am I gonna do when the best part of me was always you?”

Stories like Chris Medina reminds us of what we need, the cure we so badly need in a world so indifferent and calloused.

Steve Tyler whispered to Chris Medina’s girlfriend, “That’s why he sings so good ‘cause he sings to you all the time”. When Chris Medina got his golden ticket to Hollywood, his girlfriend uttered, “I knew it.”

Chris was not screaming it loud nor was he preaching it from the pulpit. The values and morals that have gone extinct and endangered, those are the essences he was living. He was living them. Reflected in his love for his fiancé, it was a slap against the cynics and the calloused.

Watching Chris Medina’s audition piece in youtube just made my day. Somehow, it salvaged whatever hope and trust for mankind was left in me. It made me believe again that no matter what we see on TV or read in the news or hear on the radio or surfed in the net, if we search deeper and look further, there is always some good left in every person.



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