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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Philippines: Patriarchal State

In a lucid, insightful and scholarly manner, Hutchcroft skillfully argues that the organization of Philippine political economy, which he calls a "patrimonial oligarchic state," facilitated the development of "booty capitalism." He defines booty capitalism as a situation where a group or groups "with an economic base outside the state is (are) plundering the state for particularistic resources." In other words, powerful and influential groups try to exact what they can from the state to satisfy their own interests.

Ladder To Power

  • More than 2 out of 3 representatives in the Congress have at least one close relative in public office. At least 1 in every 3 comes from a family that has maintained political influence through several generations despite changes of presidents and regimes. Many trace their origins to late 19th century ilustrado and mestizo families.
  • The most prominent legislators are also business tycoons and industry leaders- demonstrating that the link between wealth and power is really strong.
  • Very real conflicts of interest therefore exist in the House among members who must deliberate and decide on issues that touch on their propriety concerns.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Ang Dalawang Mukha ng Intramuros

Dahil sa di inaasahang pangyayari, wala akong pera sa araw na ito. At nagkataon naman na nautusan ako ng aking ina na lakarin ang ilang mahahalagang papeles sa isang opisina na makikita sa isa sa mga gusaling nakatayo sa kalagitnaan ng Intramuros. At sa hindi ko rin inaasahang pangyayari'y kailangan kong gumastos ng dos para pagpapa-photocopy ko ng isang pirasong papel! At ang nasabing dos na iyon ang bumubuo sa student fare kong siyete pesos na siyang nagpakunot ng noo ko! "Hay!" yun na lamang ang masasabi ko sa oras na iyon.

Mula Intramuros ay nag- Death March ako patungong Ermita dahil doon ang sunod na dapat kong puntahan ayon sa bilin ng nanay ko (Ang mga utos ng nanay ko ata dapat kong sisihin sa mga pasakit ko..hehe). At ang ruta ko ay mula sa Intramuros Gate papuntang pier, pakaliwa sa Padre Burgos Ave., pakaliwa nanaman patungong T.M. Kalaw hanggang Padre Faura. Sa mga sidewalk na aking nilalakaran partikular sa gilid ng Intramuros Golf Course napansin ko ang mga bakal na harang na halatang nilikha ng may arkitektura at hindi naman siya bago sa paningin ko at sa loob-loob ko nga eh, "Ang boring ng design! Di man lang maisipang palitan."

At sa kabilang bahagi ng barikadang iyon ko nakikita at napapanood ko ang mga golf caddie na umaalalay sa mga manlalaro ng golf na natural lamang ay mula sa mga may-perang estado ng lipunan. Larong pangluho para sa akin ang golf at aksaya lamang sa perang kinukupit ng mga opisyal ng gobyernong Pilipinas ang larong ito na madalas kong makita sa telebisyon o di kaya sa mga pahayagan. At bukod sa harang, mga golf caddie at mga naglalaro ng golf, napansin ko din ang mga timawa at nakasalampak sa lupa na mga maralita sa bahagi ng barikada na aking kinatatayuan. "Aray ko..", mga katagang sinasabi ng isip ko, kitang-kita mula sa magkabilang bahagi ng barikada ng Intramuros Golf course ang layo ng agwat sa buhay at estado sa lipunan ng mga taong nasa loob ng barikada na pinoproteksyunan nito- may pera, nag-gogolf, mga di timawa; At ang mga hinaharangan ng barikada- mga mahihirap, salat sa salapi at mga timawa.

Naalala ko bigla ang kasaysayan ng Intramuros noong panahon ng mga mananakop na kastila, ang Intramuros ay lugar na ekslusibo para sa mga kastila, may lahing kastila at mga illustrado. At napailing ako sa naisip ko, na ang Intramuros mula noon at hanggang ngayon ay lugar na tanging maputi, may salapi at edukado lamang ang makakapasok. Mula noon at hanggang ngayon sinasalamin niya ang malaking kaagwatan ng lipunan na ating ginagalawa. Mula noon at hanggang ngayon ang mga mapanakop lamang ang may mukhang makakatapak sa Intramuros at hanggang silip na lamang ang mgas timawa mula sa labas. Mula noon at hanggang ngayon ay hindi pa rin tayo nakakawala sa nasabing multo ng 'kolonyalismo' sa Intramuros.

Noon mga puti ang nang-aapi at walang pakialam, Ngayon mga kakulay na natin ang siyang umaanyo nito. Kung ako ang tatanungin kung sino ang may sala sa ganitong sitwasyon ng ating lipunan, ang masasabi ko lamang ay... ANG PAREHONG BAHAGI NG BARIKADA. Lahat responsable kaya lahat dapat kumilos. Pero di ko pa rin palalampasin ang mga katagang iniwan ni Rizal:

"Walang Alipin kung Walang Nagpapaalipin."

Ano ang kinalaman nito sa kuwento ko? Pag-isipan mo.

Nakauwi ako sa bahay namin sa Bulacan. Papaano? Naniniwala kasi ako sa dpanalangin at milagro.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Proofs of Our heritage of smallness

  • microlending = when small amounts of money are loaned to budding entrepreneurs
    (Mark Austin Thomas)
  • microvending = when small business owners sell tiny amounts of their products
    (Mark Austin Thomas)
  • mini-me = a person closely resembling a smaller or younger version of another
    (Concise Oxford English Dictionary)
  • miniaturization = creation of ever-smaller scales
    for mechanical and electronic
    products and devices (Wikipedia)
copy and paste MULA SA BLOG NA DIWANG PALABOY

Civil "cat" Disobedience


glitter-graphics.com

Goodbye Megalomaniac Dogs! LOL

21st century ala George Orwell's Animal Farm... this time a cat not a pig!

Monday, September 15, 2008

GET REAL: A Heritage of Smallness by Nick Joaquin

Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay mahoma; noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi.

What most astonishes foreigners in the Philippines is that this is a country, perhaps the only one in the world, where people buy and sell one stick of cigarette, half a head of garlic, a dab of pomade, part of the contents of a can or bottle, one single egg, one single banana. To foreigners used to buying things by the carton or the dozen or pound and in the large economy sizes, the exquisite transactions of Philippine tingis cannot but seem Lilliputian. So much effort by so many for so little. Like all those children risking neck and limb in the traffic to sell one stick of cigarette at a time. Or those grown-up men hunting the sidewalks all day to sell a puppy or a lantern or a pair of socks. The amount of effort they spend seems out of all proportion to the returns. Such folk are, obviously, not enough. Laboriousness just can never be the equal of labor as skill, labor as audacity, labor as enterprise.

The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is the hardest working country in the world. By six or seven in the morning we are already up on our way to work, shops and markets are open; the wheels of industry are already agrind. Abroad, especially in the West, if you go out at seven in the morning you’re in a dead-town. Everybody’s still in bed; everything’s still closed up. Activity doesn’t begin till nine or ten-- and ceases promptly at five p.m. By six, the business sections are dead towns again. The entire cities go to sleep on weekends. They have a shorter working day, a shorter working week. Yet they pile up more mileage than we who work all day and all week.

Is the disparity to our disparagement?

We work more but make less. Why? Because we act on such a pygmy scale. Abroad they would think you mad if you went in a store and tried to buy just one stick of cigarette. They don’t operate on the scale. The difference is greater than between having and not having; the difference is in the way of thinking. They are accustomed to thinking dynamically. We have the habit, whatever our individual resources, of thinking poor, of thinking petty.

Is that the explanation for our continuing failure to rise--that we buy small and sell small, that we think small and do small?

Are we not confusing timidity for humility and making a virtue of what may be the worst of our vices? Is not our timorous clinging to smallness the bondage we must break if we are ever to inherit the earth and be free, independent, progressive? The small must ever be prey to the big. Aldous Huxley said that some people are born victims, or "murderers." He came to the Philippines and thought us the "least original" of people. Is there not a relation between his two terms? Originality requires daring: the daring to destroy the obsolete, to annihilate the petty. It’s cold comfort to think we haven’t developed that kind of "murderer mentality."

But till we do we had best stop talking about "our heritage of greatness" for the national heritage is-- let’s face it-- a heritage of smallness.

However far we go back in our history it’s the small we find--the nipa hut, the barangay, the petty kingship, the slight tillage, the tingi trade. All our artifacts are miniatures and so is our folk literature, which is mostly proverbs, or dogmas in miniature. About the one big labor we can point to in our remote past are the rice terraces--and even that grandeur shrinks, on scrutiny, into numberless little separate plots into a series of layers added to previous ones, all this being the accumulation of ages of small routine efforts (like a colony of ant hills) rather than one grand labor following one grand design. We could bring in here the nursery diota about the little drops of water that make the mighty ocean, or the peso that’s not a peso if it lacks a centavo; but creative labor, alas, has sterner standards, a stricter hierarchy of values. Many little efforts, however perfect each in itself, still cannot equal one single epic creation. A galleryful of even the most charming statuettes is bound to look scant beside a Pieta or Moses by Michelangelo; and you could stack up the best short stories you can think of and still not have enough to outweigh a mountain like War and Peace.

The depressing fact in Philippine history is what seems to be our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise. The pattern may have been set by the migration. We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that of the Pilgrim, Father of America, but a glance of the map suffices to show the differences between the two ventures. One was a voyage across an ocean into an unknown world; the other was a going to and from among neighboring islands. One was a blind leap into space; the other seems, in comparison, a mere crossing of rivers. The nature of the one required organization, a sustained effort, special skills, special tools, the building of large ships. The nature of the other is revealed by its vehicle, the barangay, which is a small rowboat, not a seafaring vessel designed for long distances on the avenues of the ocean.

The migrations were thus self-limited, never moved far from their point of origin, and clung to the heart of a small known world; the islands clustered round the Malay Peninsula. The movement into the Philippines, for instance, was from points as next-door geographically as Borneo and Sumatra. Since the Philippines is at heart of this region, the movement was toward center, or, one may say, from near to still nearer, rather than to farther out. Just off the small brief circuit of these migrations was another world: the vast mysterious continent of Australia; but there was significantly no movement towards this terra incognita. It must have seemed too perilous, too unfriendly of climate, too big, too hard. So, Australia was conquered not by the fold next door, but by strangers from across two oceans and the other side of the world. They were more enterprising, they have been rewarded. But history has punished the laggard by setting up over them a White Australia with doors closed to the crowded Malay world.

The barangays that came to the Philippines were small both in scope and size. A barangay with a hundred households would already be enormous; some barangays had only 30 families, or less. These, however, could have been the seed of a great society if there had not been in that a fatal aversion to synthesis. The barangay settlements already displayed a Philippine characteristic: the tendency to petrify in isolation instead of consolidating, or to split smaller instead of growing. That within the small area of Manila Bay there should be three different kingdoms (Tondo, Manila and Pasay) may mean that the area wa originally settled by three different barangays that remained distinct, never came together, never fused; or it could mean that a single original settlement; as it grew split into three smaller pieces.

Philippine society, as though fearing bigness, ever tends to revert the condition of the barangay of the small enclosed society. We don’t grow like a seed, we split like an amoeba. The moment a town grows big it become two towns. The moment a province becomes populous it disintegrates into two or three smaller provinces. The excuse offered for divisions i always the alleged difficulty of administering so huge an entity. But Philippines provinces are microscopic compared to an American state like, say, Texas, where the local government isn’t heard complaining it can’t efficiently handle so vast an area. We, on the other hand, make a confession of character whenever we split up a town or province to avoid having of cope, admitting that, on that scale, we can’t be efficient; we are capable only of the small. The decentralization and barrio-autonomy movement expresses our craving to return to the one unit of society we feel adequate to: the barangay, with its 30 to a hundred families. Anything larger intimidates. We would deliberately limit ourselves to the small performance. This attitude, an immemorial one, explains why we’re finding it so hard to become a nation, and why our pagan forefathers could not even imagine the task. Not E pluribus, unum is the impulse in our culture but Out of many, fragments. Foreigners had to come and unite our land for us; the labor was far beyond our powers. Great was the King of Sugbu, but he couldn’t even control the tiny isle across his bay. Federation is still not even an idea for the tribes of the North; and the Moro sultanates behave like our political parties: they keep splitting off into particles.

Because we cannot unite for the large effort, even the small effort is increasingly beyond us. There is less to learn in our schools, but even this little is protested by our young as too hard. The falling line on the graph of effort is, alas, a recurring pattern in our history. Our artifacts but repeat a refrain of decline and fall, which wouldn’t be so sad if there had been a summit decline from, but the evidence is that we start small and end small without ever having scaled any peaks. Used only to the small effort, we are not, as a result, capable of the sustained effort and lose momentum fast. We have a term for it: ningas cogon.

Go to any exhibit of Philippine artifacts and the items that from our "cultural heritage" but confirm three theories about us, which should be stated again.

First: that the Filipino works best on small scale--tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of the big.

Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy materials--clay, molten metal, tree searching has failed to turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even carabao horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has not been used to any extent remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is that we feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge of materials that resist.

Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we tend to rut in it and don’t move on to a next phase, a larger development, based on what we have learned. In fact, we instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses when confronted by a challenge from outside of something more masterly, instead of being provoked to develop by the threat of competition. Faced by the challenge of Chinese porcelain, the native art of pottery simply declined, though porcelain should have been the next phase for our pottery makers. There was apparently no effort to steal and master the arts of the Chinese. The excuse offered here that we did not have the materials for the techniques for the making of porcelain--unites in glum brotherhood yesterday’s pottery makers and today’s would be industrialists. The native pot got buried by Chinese porcelain as Philippine tobacco is still being buried by the blue seal.

Our cultural history, rather than a cumulative development, seems mostly a series of dead ends. One reason is a fear of moving on to a more complex phase; another reason is a fear of tools. Native pottery, for instance, somehow never got far enough to grasp the principle of the wheel. Neither did native agriculture ever reach the point of discovering the plow for itself, or even the idea of the draft animal, though the carabao was handy. Wheel and plow had to come from outside because we always stopped short of technology, This stoppage at a certain level is the recurring fate of our arts and crafts.

The santo everybody’s collecting now are charming as legacies, depressing as indices, for the art of the santero was a small art, in a not very demanding medium: wood. Having achieved perfection in it, the santero was faced by the challenge of proving he could achieve equal perfection on a larger scale and in more difficult materials: hardstone, marble, bronze. The challenge was not met. Like the pagan potter before him, the santero stuck to his tiny rut, repeating his little perfections over and over. The iron law of life is: Develop or decay. The art of the santero did not advance; so it declined. Instead of moving onto a harder material, it retreated to a material even easier than wool: Plaster--and plaster has wrought the death of relax art.

One could go on and on with this litany.

Philippine movies started 50 years ago and, during the ‘30s, reached a certain level of proficiency, where it stopped and has rutted ever since looking more and more primitive as the rest of the cinema world speeds by on the way to new frontiers. We have to be realistic, say local movie producers we’re in this business not to make art but money. But even from the business viewpoint, they’re not "realistic" at all. The true businessman ever seeks to increase his market and therefore ever tries to improve his product. Business dies when it resigns itself, as local movies have done, to a limited market.

After more than half a century of writing in English, Philippine Literature in that medium is still identified with the short story. That small literary form is apparently as much as we feel equal to. But by limiting ourselves less and less capable even of the small thing--as the fate of the pagan potter and the Christian santero should have warned us. It’ no longer as obvious today that the Filipino writer has mastered the short story form.

It’s two decades since the war but what were mere makeshift in postwar days have petrified into institutions like the jeepney, which we all know to be uncomfortable and inadequate, yet cannot get rid of, because the would mean to tackle the problem of modernizing our systems of transportation--a problem we think so huge we hide from it in the comforting smallness of the jeepney. A small solution to a huge problem--do we deceive ourselves into thinking that possible? The jeepney hints that we do, for the jeepney carrier is about as adequate as a spoon to empty a river with.

With the population welling, and land values rising, there should be in our cities, an upward thrust in architecture, but we continue to build small, in our timid two-story fashion. Oh, we have excuses. The land is soft: earthquakes are frequent. But Mexico City, for instance, is on far swampier land and Mexico City is not a two-story town. San Francisco and Tokyo are in worse earthquake belts, but San Francisco and Tokyo reach up for the skies. Isn’t our architecture another expression of our smallness spirit? To build big would pose problems too big for us. The water pressure, for example, would have to be improved--and it’s hard enough to get water on the ground floor flat and frail, our cities indicate our disinclination to make any but the smallest effort possible.

It wouldn’t be so bad if our aversion for bigness and our clinging to the small denoted a preference for quality over bulk; but the little things we take forever to do too often turn out to be worse than the mass-produced article. Our couturiers, for instance, grow even limper of wrist when, after waiting months and months for a pin ~a weaver to produce a yard or two of the fabric, they find they have to discard most of the stuff because it’s so sloppily done. Foreigners who think of pushing Philippine fabric in the world market give up in despair after experiencing our inability to deliver in quantity. Our proud apologia is that mass production would ruin the "quality" of our products. But Philippine crafts might be roused from the doldrums if forced to come up to mass-production standards.

It’s easy enough to quote the West against itself, to cite all those Western artists and writers who rail against the cult of bigness and mass production and the "bitch goddess success"; but the arguments against technological progress, like the arguments against nationalism, are possible only to those who have already gone through that stage so successfully they can now afford to revile it. The rest of us can only crave to be big enough to be able to deplore bigness.

For the present all we seen to be able to do is ignore pagan evidence and blame our inability to sustain the big effort of our colonizers: they crushed our will and spirit, our initiative and originality. But colonialism is not uniquely our ordeal but rather a universal experience. Other nations went under the heel of the conqueror but have not spent the rest of their lives whining. What people were more trod under than the Jews? But each have been a thoroughly crushed nation get up and conquered new worlds instead. The Norman conquest of England was followed by a subjugation very similar to our experience, but what issued from that subjugation were the will to empire and the verve of a new language.

If it be true that we were enervated by the loss of our primordial freedom, culture and institutions, then the native tribes that were never under Spain and didn’t lose what we did should be showing a stronger will and spirit, more initiative and originality, a richer culture and greater progress, than the Christian Filipino. Do they? And this favorite apologia of ours gets further blasted when we consider a people who, alongside us, suffered a far greater trampling yet never lost their enterprising spirit. On the contrary, despite centuries of ghettos and programs and repressive measures and racial scorn, the Chinese in the Philippines clambered to the top of economic heap and are still right up there when it comes to the big deal. Shouldn’t they have long come to the conclusion (as we say we did) that there’s no point in hustling and laboring and amassing wealth only to see it wrested away and oneself punished for rising?

An honest reading of our history should rather force us to admit that it was the colonial years that pushed us toward the larger effort. There was actually an advance in freedom, for the unification of the land, the organization of towns and provinces, and the influx of new ideas, started our liberation from the rule of the petty, whether of clan, locality or custom. Are we not vexed at the hinterlander still bound by primordial terrors and taboos? Do we not say we have to set him "free" through education? Freedom, after all is more than a political condition; and the colonial lowlander--especially a person like, say, Rizal--was surely more of a freeman than the unconquered tribesman up in the hills. As wheel and plow set us free from a bondage to nature, so town and province liberated us from the bounds of the barangay.

The liberation can be seen just by comparing our pagan with our Christian statuary. What was static and stolid in the one becomes, in the other, dynamic motion and expression. It can be read in the rear of architecture. Now, at last, the Filipino attempts the massive--the stone bridge that unites, the irrigation dam that gives increase, the adobe church that identified. If we have a "heritage of greatness it’s in these labors and in three epic acts of the colonial period; first, the defense of the land during two centuries of siege; second, the Propaganda Movement; and the third, the Revolution.

The first, a heroic age that profoundly shaped us, began 1600 with the 50-year war with the Dutch and may be said to have drawn to a close with the British invasion of 1762. The War with the Dutch is the most under-rated event in our history, for it was the Great War in our history. It had to be pointed out that the Philippines, a small colony practically abandoned to itself, yet held at bay for half a century the mightiest naval power in the world at the time, though the Dutch sent armada after armada, year after year, to conquer the colony, or by cutting off the galleons that were its links with America, starve the colony to its knees. We rose so gloriously to the challenge the impetus of spirit sent us spilling down to Borneo and the Moluccas and Indo-China, and it seemed for a moment we might create an empire. But the tremendous effort did create an elite vital to our history: the Creole-Tagalog-Pampango principalia - and ruled it together during these centuries of siege, and which would which was the nation in embryo, which defended the land climax its military career with the war of resistance against the British in the 1660’s. By then, this elite already deeply felt itself a nation that the government it set up in Bacolor actually defined the captive government in Manila as illegitimate. From her flows the heritage that would flower in Malolos, for centuries of heroic effort had bred, in Tagalog and the Pampango, a habit of leadership, a lordliness of spirit. They had proved themselves capable of the great and sustained enterprise, destiny was theirs. An analyst of our history notes that the sun on our flag has eight rays, each of which stands for a Tagalog or Pampango province, and the the Tagalogs and Pampangos at Biak-na-Bato "assumed the representation of the entire country and, therefore, became in fact the Philippines.

From the field of battle this elite would, after the British war, shift to the field of politics, a significant move; and the Propaganda, which began as a Creole campaign against the Peninsulars, would turn into the nationalist movement of Rizal and Del Pilar. This second epic act in our history seemed a further annulment of the timidity. A man like Rizal was a deliberate rebel against the cult of the small; he was so various a magus because he was set on proving that the Filipino could tackle the big thing, the complex job. His novels have epic intentions; his poems sustain the long line and go against Garcia Villa’s more characteristically Philippine dictum that poetry is the small intense line.

With the Revolution, our culture is in dichotomy. This epic of 1896 is indeed a great effort--but by a small minority. The Tagalog and Pampango had taken it upon themselves to protest the grievances of the entire archipelago. Moreover, within the movement was a clash between the two strains in our culture--between the propensity for the small activity and the will to something more ambitious. Bonifacio’s Katipunan was large in number but small in scope; it was a rattling of bolos; and its post fiasco efforts are little more than amok raids in the manner the Filipino is said to excel in. (An observation about us in the last war was that we fight best not as an army, but in small informal guerrilla outfits; not in pitched battle, but in rapid hit-and-run raids.) On the other hand, there was, in Cavite, an army with officers, engineers, trenches, plans of battle and a complex organization - a Revolution unlike all the little uprisings or mere raids of the past because it had risen above tribe and saw itself as the national destiny. This was the highest we have reached in nationalistic effort. But here again, having reached a certain level of achievement, we stopped. The Revolution is, as we say today, "unfinished."

The trend since the turn of the century, and especially since the war, seems to be back to the tradition of timidity, the heritage of smallness. We seem to be making less and less effort, thinking ever smaller, doing even smaller. The air droops with a feeling of inadequacy. We can’t cope; we don’t respond; we are not rising to challenges. So tiny a land as ours shouldn’t be too hard to connect with transportation - but we get crushed on small jeepneys, get killed on small trains, get drowned in small boats. Larger and more populous cities abroad find it no problem to keep themselves clean - but the simple matter of garbage can create a "crisis" in the small city of Manila. One American remarked that, after seeing Manila’s chaos of traffic, he began to appreciate how his city of Los Angeles handles its far, far greater volume of traffic. Is building a road that won’t break down when it rains no longer within our powers? Is even the building of sidewalks too herculean of task for us?

One writer, as he surveyed the landscape of shortages---no rice, no water, no garbage collectors, no peace, no order---gloomily mumbled that disintegration seems to be creeping upon us and groped for Yeat’s terrifying lines:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold:

Mere anarchy is loosed...

Have our capacities been so diminished by the small efforts we are becoming incapable even to the small things? Our present problems are surely not what might be called colossal or insurmountable--yet we stand helpless before them. As the population swells, those problems will expand and multiply. If they daunt us now, will they crush us then? The prospect is terrifying.

On the Feast of Freedom we may do well to ponder the Parable of the Servants and the Talents. The enterprising servants who increase talents entrusted to them were rewarded by their Lord; but the timid servant who made no effort to double the one talent given to him was deprived of that talent and cast into the outer darkness, where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth:

"For to him who has, more shall be given; but from him who has not, even the little he has shall be taken away."

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Nars


The ever-growing number of nursing graduates lining up for work abroad shows the desperate situation that the Filipino people are in; where the swelling numbers of the unemployed and underemployed leave the youth with no option but to aim for work abroad. This also shows the folly of the labor export policy, the failure of the Arroyo government to generate jobs, and the irony of having too many nurses while having understaffed government hospitals and health centers, and inaccessible health services. So much for “Ramdam ang kaunlaran.”

BY FLON FAURILLO
BULATLAT
Vol. VIII, No. 31, September 7-13, 2008


BUZZ...BUZZ...

Diktador: McCoy Produkto ng UP


Ferdinand Marcos: Hinubog ng Makabayang Unibersidad, Pinag-aral ng buwis ng bawat Pilipino, Inalipi't binusabos ang Pilipinas, Isinuka ang lahat ng prinsipyong itinanim ng UP.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Important Dates for NAIA Terminal 3


March 26, 2006

August 3, 2008

September 10, 2008


These are the three consecutive dates when NAIA Terminal 3's ceiling fell!

Only in the Philippines...

Happy Anniversary!

Sa Simbahan ng Nazareno ng Quiapo, Maynila

lulan ako ng fx papunta sa unibersidad ng biglang nadaan o nakuha ang atensyon ko ng isang karatula o babala sa harap ng simbahan ng Nazareno sa Quiapo...

Mag-ingat sa mga Masasamang elemento, Snatcher, mandurukot, lalo na sa mga batang nagtitinda ng supot.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Ang hindi Mo dapat palampasin

http://blog.thebrownraise.org/

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Philippines: A Country of 2 Nations

"We are Filipino and Bangsamoro."

"Our people would like to call themselves as Filipino and a Bangsamoro citizen. They cannot do away with their identity as a Moro or as a Bangsamoro. We are Filipinos at the same time Bangsamoro. We are Bangsamoro at the same time Filipinos. We are part of a larger nation."

"Officially, we are citizens of the Philippines. But if you ask our people and also many knowledgeable Filipinos, they will tell you that this country is composed of two nations, the Filipino nation and the Bangsamoro nation that was born much, much longer. We were very much ahead in this part of the world. This is the reality here,"


-Nur Misuari

answers of Nur Misuari, chairman of the Moro National Liberation Front and former professor of the University of the Philippines, when he was asked if Moros consider themselves Filipinos.

Sad to say, He is not alone. Majority of the Filipinos has the same answer.

I Am an Ilocano at the same time Filipino.
I Am a Batangueno at the same time Filipino.

... an Ilonggo at the same time Filipino.

______________________________

"Mindanao is known to be the Bangsamoro homeland since time immemorial. And the people there are known to be Bangsamoro people. Now, I don't know how you can make any distinction between the two."

-Nur Misuari

Their identity is tied to their land, to their ethnic group, to their family ties, not to the nation where they really belong. Worse, some would exclaim that they are not Filipinos and have nothing to do with it even though their skin shows who they really are.

______________________________

"I think it is not useful to raise this very sensitive question. It is important we live in harmony with each other to promote peace, economic progress, and prosperity, make citizens happy, harmonious, contented, so on and so forth...

But if we allow our people to remain in the backwater of economic and social and cultural development, with money to be concentrated in Luzon and Visayas at the expense of Mindanao when we are contributing a huge portion to budget, people should expect there will be perpetual crisis in Mindanao...


That's why we are proposing that changes should lead to the creation of an egalitarian state where there is no more discrimination, no more exploitation, that no single sector will say we are superior, more educated, etc. That should not be allowed to come to the fore because (that would) instigate some kind of reaction. Government should treat us with justice."


-Nur Misuari

Egalitarian government or Egalitarian society is a social order, a belief that all people are, in principle, equal and should enjoy equal social, political, and economic rights and opportunities.
It can never be attain by creating or splitting the nation into 2, divorcing from the nation, and then claim that you can be both- Bansangmoro and Filipino. Such avowals is blasphemous to the nation, to the sacrifices of our national heroes- our heroes from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, to the identity the Heavens set forth for us.


Heaven have mercy on us...

source: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/topstories/topstories/view/20080902-158167/Misuari-on-Moro-identity-We-are-Filipino-and-Bangsamoro




Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Sipi: Mula sa Pananaw ng ating mga Bayani

Ngunit walang tao na karapat-dapat sa aking pangangalaga at kalinga kung hindi siya pumipintuho sa akin at umiibig sa akin, at kung wala siyang kakayahang mamatay para sa aking adhika.
-Kalayaan

mula sa panunulat ni Emilio Jacinto

Upang maitindig natin ang bantayog ng ating lipunan, kailangang radikal nating baguhin hindi lamang ang ating mga institusyon kundi maging ang pag-iisip at pamumuhay. Kailangan ang Rebolusyon, hindi lamang sa panlabas, kundi lalo na sa panloob.

Apolinario Mabini, La Revolucion Filipinas (1898)

"Hindi lahat ng naugalian ay mabuti", paliwanag ni Kalayaan, "May masamanh kahiligan at ang mga ito'y dapat iwaksi lagi ang mga tao."

mula sa panunulat ni Emilio Jacinto




Monday, September 1, 2008

Random Facts: NFA Rice

  • NFA Rice selling price increased from P18.25 to P25.00 per kilogram.
  • The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DWSD) has begun accepting family access cards from the “poorest of the poor” to purchase cheap, government subsidized rice for P18.25 a kilo.
  • NCR has the lowest poverty incidence in the country but 50% of GMA's NFA Rice subsidies and "NFA Rice Access Cards" are to be distributed in the NCR.
  • There are longer and longer lines of people queuing for NFA rice, but the government has drastically reduced the ration for each consumer from three kilos per person to just one. And they are now even using marking systems like indelible ink, IDs and Pen tel pens to control the buying of rice, sign of NFA rice distribution shortage.
  • I saw a middle class/ office clerk wearing a suit with a tie holding a bag of NFA Rice in one of my bus ride going to Bulacan.