Revillame Revisited, Part I of III

A Portrait of Slow Transformation

By Mila D. Aguilar

Yes, "progressive" darlings, I went to see "Wil Time Bigtime" at its reopening inside ABC-5 on Saturday.

And that’s because I never agreed with your self-righteous rants about Willie Revillame, nor your total damnation of his episode with the hapless boy who macho-danced on his show.

Rather, I have always wondered what made Willie Revillame tick with the masses. These are the masses you are supposed to be loving, at least ideologically, but whom you have never really known. Because the masses you know are the indoctrinated ones, the ones we both call "organized," who do not gyrate or sing or laugh spontaneously.

I have been in search of those masses the past thirty years, and have found them. They are not the masses you know.  They are the masses that Willie Revillame knows. He is a representative of those masses.

That is why I have been keeping tabs of Willie Revillame some years now. Not consistently, but closely enough to see that through the years, he has developed, even if by the painful little, shedding his grossness and crassness bit by bit.

My memory of his first suspension was when he, Randy Santiago and John Estrada joked very badly about some sexy vixen beside them, giggling like adolescents with their flies virtually open. Correct my remembrance of the event if I’m wrong.

That suspension, if I remember right, hardly tempered Willie’s attitude towards women, but it did temper his crassness, if only a bit.

Barely-clad women still dance sexily on his shows -- as they do in all viable entertainment extravaganzas -- but he has stopped looking at them lustily, at least in public. For me, this is a very big development both for Willie personally and in terms of his influence over the public at large, even if it happened over a long decade.

But what got me more interested in Willie was when he started to show his compassion for the masses. That was already manifest while he was at ABS-CBN in his tear-jerking interviews with his contestants. You know, if you’re truly in love with the people you pretend to espouse, you show it by the way you ask questions about their personal lives. If you are able to show your sincere interest, they respond to you with the truth -- the naked truth, which may seem vulgar at some points to you who are ensconced in your petty bourgeois ivory towers, but are enough to wrench the hearts of Willie’s masa viewers, who came from the same truth.

At ABS-CBN, however, the money relationship between Willie and the masa often came to the fore. There was even a time when some starlets sang to him something like “Money, Money, Money, Give Me Money and I’ll Give You Love.” You could tell from his face that the song hurt. It was as if the crass jokes he had made with Randy Santiago and John Estrada had come back to him karma-like in the form of a crass song about money. It was as if the reality of his relationship with his mother had struck him dead in his tracks.

At TV5, the money relationship was happily subsumed under his genuine feelings for the people. He still gave away gifts and prizes, and the masses still hankered for them, but the love relationship was on its way to some form of purification -- until, of course, the six-year-old Jan-Jan came onstage, and Willie’s old habit of sincerely trying to give his masses “saya at tuwa” got the better of him.

I don’t blame you for pouncing on that. I do suspect that the media fervor was whipped up in no small measure by parties interested in getting back audience lost during the hours he was on air, but I don’t blame those parties either; all is fair in profit-oriented love and war. But I do stare in wonderment at how none of you who style yourselves as “progressive” saw that Willie Revillame is a child of the class divide and should therefore become a subject of study if not sympathy, but not of utter revilement.

Have you ever tried to get authentic feedback from your un-indoctrinated maids, at the very least? They will tell you that they like Willie because “nakakatulong siya sa tao,” “nagbibigay siya ng saya.” And they will not understand why you have so willy-nilly attacked him.

But anyway, he’s back, to the consternation of the competition. His production team has tried to put together a more thoughtful show highlighted by a state of the art high-definition LED floor. They have integrated your high-brow requirement of a quiz portion at the end of the show. Hopefully that will educate your great unwashed -- your great unwashed, whose priority has, according to the latest studies, always been television, radio and newspapers whether they can afford it or not; in other words INFORMATION, belying your charge of ignorance on them.

Those, however, are not what I noted in my mind when I watched the reopening on Saturday.

What I noticed first and foremost was that the show started with a -- surprise -- prayer! The young man who prayed asked for guidance from the Lord God of heaven and earth. And his prayer, rather long by TV standards, ended with “in Jesus’ name, Amen”!

I asked Jay Montelibano, ABC-5 Managing Director of TV Productions, if this was a practice before the reopening, and he said Yes. Of course I have no one to verify his claim, but my main concern is Willie Revillame anyway. Did I see any change in Willie with regard to his spiritual wellbeing?

I certainly did. While Jay replied that Willie himself had been mentioning God before the reopening, it was my first time to notice. In fact, in the previous show, I was rather concerned that while more and more of his contestants referred to the Lord as their source of strength, he would not respond to them in any way. This time, however, the words came from the man himself.

Does this matter? Isn’t it all a show?

I would say Yes, it matters, and No, it wasn’t a show. The man is transparent -- more transparent than any of your “progressives” or even “saints.” It was his very transparency that got him into all that trouble with the sex jokes, with his 2010 endorsement of Manny Villar, with the Jan-Jan episode. So this time, his transparency speaks of his humbling; he is now, by his very comportment, awed by the God who causes his constant rise and fall; none of his seeming arrogance showed, at least last Saturday.

It was his transparency too that caused him to thank, among others, such Christians as Gary and Angeli Valenciano and Bro. Eddie Villanueva for their heartfelt greetings and concern for him.

It was his transparency that caused him to gush over being regaled to lunch or dinner by rich men and women -- he who came from the poor, he who once had no manners!

So has he totally changed once and for all?

I would like to say Yes, but I remember how long it has taken me to shed all my sins since I surrendered to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Master and was born again of the Holy Spirit. It took God ten years to sweep off the major cobwebs in my mind and another ten years to wash me further of my past. I’m now on my twenty-first year in His service, and He still has to squeeze me of my earthly habits a little bit more!

So now here’s the rub: At the Saturday reopening, Willie brought out a tiny elephant that he said had been given to him by Cristina Ponce-Enrile because it was “maswerte.”

That tiny elephant is indicative of the idols Willie still has to smash in his life. One of those idols is his relationship with his mother. Successful men (and maybe women too) usually have a troublesome relationship with their mothers. It took me sometime to get over my own, and my mother wasn’t even the problem; it was my own rebellion. I was more terrible to my son than my mother ever was to me. So I could imagine how Willie must feel about his mother.

As long as he doesn’t get over that, he will keep on making mistakes, and the competition will keep on pouncing on him.

But once he gets over it, once he has forgiven her fully, once he starts talking openly about her, about his dire poverty and how he grew up; in fact, once he starts to genuinely love a woman for what she is because she loves him for himself -- not his money, nor his talents --, he is certain to become the greatest entertainment host in Philippine history.

***
Part II: The Great Class Divide
Part III: What Then Should Be Done?

Revillame Revisited: Part II of III

The Great Class Divide

By Mila D. Aguilar

Transformation is not an easy thing to understand if one tends to think statically.

It’s a slow process, especially if one is not willing to change. If can be hastened only by two types of surrender -- first and foremost, total surrender to the Jesus as one’s Lord and Master; and next, surrender of that particular aspect of one’s life that has to be changed.

One can, on the one hand, try one’s best to change a particular trait or habit by one’s lonesome, without Jesus. That makes for a totally bogged down process, a process that repeats its mistakes over and over again like a broken record without end. It’s why I couldn’t truly, totally change in that period of my life when I denied His existence.

One can, on the other hand, surrender to Jesus as one’s Lord and Master and yet not surrender a particular aspect of one’s life. That makes for a slowing down of the process of transformation. It’s why God took so long to change me.

The process of transformation has to be dialectical. God can change you, but you have to be willing to change. Being a respecter of persons, He won’t move until you ask Him.

But once you do with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, you can be sure He’ll do wondrous things for you. For he can make the blind see and the deaf hear -- as long as they ask.

Has Willie asked? Has he surrendered to Jesus as His Lord and Master?

I don’t know; I haven’t met him personally. I can only tell that there has been some amount of change in the way he conducts his show, as outlined in the first part of this article. Those changes are indicative of some amount of transformation, but how deep the transformation is, we don’t know yet. As I suggested, he will have to surrender himself totally to God, as well as keep contending with certain areas of his past to fully surmount his conduct.

In the meantime, God must love him so much that He keeps shaking him with all manner of personal and professional crises. It looks to me like He really wants him to keep changing.

For the better.

Transformation is a process that a person or society undergoes for the better. The opposite of transformation is retrogression. While a great many individuals in our society have been transformed to some extent or other, our society in general has been retrogressing.

And that is the context in which we must place Willie Revillame, not to excuse him, but to objectify our sentiments regarding his misdemeanors.

Retrogression: The Social Context

History professor and National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) commissioner Ferdie Llanes has suggested that the solution to the problem of Willie Revillame is education. He is right. But before we get to the solution, let us identify the problem.

Those of you who went to primary and secondary public school in the Philippines before 1972 will remember that your classes opened at 7 am and ended at 4 pm. In other words, you spent a total of eight hours in school.

Each of your subjects lasted at least 45 minutes. Am I correct?

And the absolute maximum number of classmates you had was 40; 30, however, was the average.

For English, you had one 45-minute subject for Reading, as well as a separate 45-minute subject for Writing. In high school, another 45-minute subject, Composition, may even have been added. That made many of you rather good in English, and most of you at the very least passable.

For Tagalog, you had at least one 45-minute subject. It didn’t result in mastery of the language, but at least it taught you to distinguish between the two languages and your vernacular, if any.

Then you had three separate subjects of 45 minutes each: History, Geography, and Social Science.

Since they were three separate subjects, you were able to learn facts and figures from the history not only of the Philippines, but even of the United States. That was History.

You were able to memorize maps; you knew where Cotabato was even if you were from Ilocos Norte. And you even knew the relative location of New York! That was Geography.

You knew that in the olden times, before the Spaniards came, the tribes had aliping namamahay and aliping sagigilid. You knew that the tribes were called balanghay or barangay. You knew that each barangay had a datu. You even knew that the Native Americans, called American Indians at that time, were also tribal, and that they had a council of elders led by a chieftain. That was Social Studies.

In fact, many of you were so good that you became outstanding students at the University of the Philippines, bringing with you the names Arellano, Araullo, Ramon Magsaysay and other public high schools.

But do you know that things have changed drastically since, and pupils aren’t taught the way you were?

The retrogression of the Philippine educational system can be traced back to 1968 with the formation of the Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education, or PCSPE. The survey was funded by the World Bank. It was supposed to see how Philippine education could be improved.

The findings of the PCSPE were published under the title Education for National Development in 1970.

These findings recommended the use of public primary and secondary schools as training grounds for technical workers with middle level skills. This, PCSPE said, had to be done in the name of national development.

In order to achieve this aim, PCSPE further recommended that the time for teaching science and math be increased.

But in order to increase the time for teaching science and math, PCSPE recommended that the time for teaching Languages be decreased.

But that wasn’t enough. PCSPE also recommended that the three 45-minutes-each subjects of History, Geography and Social Studies be merged into ONE 45-minute subject.

The Philippine Congress at that time, being of a progressive nationalist bent, resoundingly objected to the PCSPE recommendations.
They deduced that the decrease of Language subjects would result in students who had no skill in science and math either -- for the teaching and learning of science and math necessitate language skills.

They smelled that the merging of History, Geography and Social Studies would result in students without a sense of history, national culture and nationhood.

They suspected that the only reason the World Bank wanted a massive training of technical workers with middle level skills was to feed the factories of foreign corporations with cheap labor.

Moreover, they knew that the sixties were a turbulent era of worldwide student revolts over the Vietnam War, and therefore the real intent of the PCSPE “Education for National Development” was to rid the curriculum of the liberal arts and humanities orientation that led students to revolt against the reigning order.

The recommendations of the World Bank, by the way, were not confined to the Philippines alone. They were imposed in various forms and degrees on all countries of the world, the United States and Europe included, where most student revolts had occurred.

So the PCSPE recommendations did not pass the scrutiny of Congress.

1972: Martial Law is Imposed

Then Marcos, with the apparent blessings of the U.S., imposed martial law on September 21, 1972.

A day or two later, he signed P.D. 6-A, known as the “Educational Development Decree of 1972,” its Objective #2 being: “Train the nation’s manpower in the middle level skill required for national development.”

Like all bills and laws, P.D. 6-A by itself sounds innocuous enough, with its great and glorious phrases and terms for national ek-ek -- except for its giveaway Objective #2.

But then, when the next school year came, all the recommendations of PCSPE began to be implemented. English became one subject, and History, Geography and Social Studies were merged into one subject called “Sibika.”

So all public school pupils who were born in 1967 and were age six in 1973 started to lose their mastery of the languages, their sense of history, their sense of geography, their sense of national culture, and their sense of nationhood.

These pupils graduated from public elementary school in 1979. They would step into high school the same year.

But while P.D. 6-A allotted ten years and included high school for the development of the iniquitous curriculum, it seemed that a decree wasn’t enough to cement martial law babies and the succeeding generations in its mire.

By 1978, Marcos was forced to form an Interim Batasan Pambansa, and by 1980, he was forced to cosmetically “lift” martial law. So, to further cement martial law babies and the succeeding generations in the mire, Edgardo Angara sponsored an Education Act, which became the Education Bill of 1982.

The Education Bill of 1982, like all bills and laws and P.D. 6-A as well, sounds innocuous enough, with its great and glorious phrases and terms for national ek-ek, except for its giveaway Objective #2 -- which, exactly like P.D. 6-A, states: “Train the nation’s manpower in the middle level skill required for national development.”

So the first generation trained purposely without a mastery of the languages, without a sense of history, without a sense of geography, without a sense of national culture, and without a sense of nationhood graduated from high school in 1983, and from college in 1987.

Those who graduated with an education degree in 1987 became the teachers of the succeeding generations of educational victims.

The next generation of teachers graduated in 2001.

But these two generations were not as hapless as the generation that followed them.

Further Retrogression: RBEC 2002

By the year 2002, despite the millions sent abroad as overseas contract workers starting in the early eighties and increased substantially as a matter of economic policy by the Cory administration after 1986, the education budget was getting smaller by ratio to the national debt and military spending.

Not enough money was allotted to build more classrooms and train more teachers, and the government was unwilling, unable and/or instructed not to spend more.

So Raul Roco thought of a brilliant idea: reduce the number of subjects to five starting with Grade 2 (four in Grade 1), with only 35 minutes allotted to each subject. The five subjects are: English, Pilipino, Science, Math, and Makabayan, which FURTHER squished the five subjects of P.E., M.S.E.P., E.K.A.W.P., and Sibika at Kultura into one!

“Makabayan,” with all its pretensions to the name, is actually physical education, practical arts, music and what not rolled into one.

It is “Et Al,” “Maka,” but definitely not for the bayan.

As a result of Roco’s RBEC, schools were able to hold not only one shift of classes but THREE -- one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.

Parents became happy with the arrangement, because then they could send or employ their young as child labor the rest of the day. These child laborers will be graduating from high school next year, 2012. In 2016 some of them will be college graduates.

Such is the educational situation up to this very date, May 17, 2011.

The hapless teacher majority, who had graduated after 1987 or worse, 2001, are hard-pressed to teach 80-100 students, 35 minutes taking up all of their time just to call the roll.

I know, because I talked to about a hundred of them taking their masteral and doctoral education courses at U.P. Diliman last week.

SO WHAT ABOUT WILLIE?

So what do all these have to do with Willie Revillame, you ask.

Nothing and everything. Willie may not even have gone to school; so secretive is he about his private life, we don’t know what grade he reached.

But certainly, the vast majority of his audience come from the ranks of these martial law babies.

They not only have no firm grasp of any language, no sense of history, no sense of geography, no conceptual sense of national culture, no studied sense of nationhood; they could, at this point, hardly read and write, having been given so little time in school to learn to do it.

None of them could be proud to have come from Arellano, Araullo or Ramon Magsaysay High School anymore.

Much as they would like to succeed in life, therefore -- and they do, they do, I can assure you -- they know, unless they are exceptionally bright and gifted, that they have nowhere to go except abroad, as domestics, drivers, dancers or prostitutes -- despite their diplomas.

In the meantime, while they cannot afford the fees, they are forced to live vagrant lives in the cities.

Their only salvation is jueteng, or the lotto, or some kind soul who would send them or their children through school if not employ them despite their delimited brains.

That kind soul can be Manny Villar, or Jojo Binay, or whatever other politician they could hang on to.

Or it could be Willie Revillame.

Otherwise, without that shot at jueteng, at lotto, without that kind soul who would look at them with empathy in his/her eyes and employ them or send their children to school, what choices are they left with?

They could pick pockets at Divisoria, slither into your houses or cars to steal, kidnap your children, carnap your vehicles, hold you hostage for a million or so, sell shabu.

But most of them still have enough of a fear in God to not want to do that.

So they hang on to Willie Revillame.

The Great Class Chasm

But you know, the most painful factoid in this desperate scenario is that those who had enough resources to go to private schools from elementary up did not suffer the same fate.

While they too were deprived of the separate subjects of History, Geography and Social Studies, they could, up to now, still go to school from 7 am to 4 pm.

If their school administrators are particularly progressive, these could even go around the strictures of “Sibika” and later, “Makabayan,” to infuse more national content into their curricula.

And there are still just a maximum of 30 of them per class.

So now, isn’t that great? The middle classes, the OFWs who earn a little extra to send at least one child to a private school, are saved!

The problem is, the majority are damned.

Where before 1972, the problem was between the rich and the poor, now it is between the rich, the middle classes, and the poor. The middle classes have lost all empathy for the poor, are ever more distant from them, and now treat them the way the rich always did -- like dirt.

That is your great class chasm today.

***
Part I: A Portrait of Slow Transformation
Part III: What Then Should Be Done?

Revillame Revisited: Part III of III

What Then Should be Done?

By Mila D. Aguilar

A political genius once advised me: “Take the long view.”

Though that political genius has long since been reviled, I have never forgotten his advice.

Taking the long view enables us to see solutions instead of just problems.

It enables us to zoom out of ourselves so that we may see us interacting with our fellows, the situations that surround us and our fellows, the world around our respective situations, and even the multiverses that envelop our world.

If we are able to admit that the multiverse is composed not only of matter but also of spirit, of thought, of energy, of diwa, we might even see the wars in the heavenlies that are being waged at the same time as and in parallel with our wars on earth.

At the very least, it could bring us away from our preoccupation with the minutiae of character assassination and its tendency to divide the nation.

So, having taken the long view away from the seeming nuisance that is Willie Revillame, let us look into the solutions to our vast, and some do think hopeless, social problems.

1. Extend Class Hours, not School Years

When I spoke as a member of a panel of three at the College of Education last week, the hundred masteral and doctoral public school teachers who were there heartily agreed that 35 minutes is too short a period for them to teach anything.

They agreed even more heartily to my proposition that the solution to the problem of shortened class hours was to build more classrooms and employ more teachers.

And they roundly agreed with my stand that as a nation incredibly endowed with natural resources, in fact with a budget that enables the corrupt to pocket 40 percent of it, we CAN afford to build more classrooms and employ more teachers.

The question merely redounds to a matter of policy, of thrust, of POLITICAL WILL AND NATIONAL RESOLVE.

But then, of course, forces greater than us will conspire against such a move.

These may be the same imperial forces that conspired to bring about the PCSPE in the first place.

They may be the same forces that have conspired for decades, indeed centuries, to keep our masses down on their knees, begging for alms.

They may be the same forces that would extend school years, rather than class hours, compounding the problem rather than solving it.

We need to struggle against such forces.

Indeed, we need to pray for God to break them apart and bind them up, so that they can do us no more harm.

2. Restore History, Geography & Social Studies in all Grade Levels

This will be an even greater struggle than the first.

No empire would want to see a people already disarmed gaining back their sense of history, culture and nationhood.

But we have to struggle and pray for it, because otherwise we will soon be lost as a people, our riches taken over by others who through their own folly have depleted their natural and human resources.

3. Promote Mastery of Knowledge through Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)

MTB-MLE is education that starts with the use of the student’s first language as medium of instruction, with the graduated introduction of second languages as subjects.

It has already been introduced by DepEd in a memo to all schools and is being implemented with the able help of the U.P. College of Education and other institutions and non-governmental organizations of language learning.

Studies have shown -- including my father’s pioneering Iloilo Experiment way back in 1948 -- that pupils learn faster, better and more when their own language is used as the medium of instruction.

But full and effective implementation of MTB-MLE will not succeed unless class hours are extended. Otherwise, MTB-MLE will fail, contributing merely a more effective method of teaching but heavily burdened by the constraints of time.

Learning is cumulative, and time is of the essence in cumulating knowledge and skills to achieve learning.

But with the extension of class hours as well as the revival of History, Geography and Social Studies in the curriculum, MTB-MLE will be a perfect fit.

That is, once we have gotten rid, through struggle and prayer, of the forces that would enchain us.

4. Build Entrepreneurship into the Curriculum & Establish Entrepreneurial High Schools

For more than a decade I have been so vocal against our culture of dependency, I have even attempted to trace it historically and offer a solution to it.

That solution is entrepreneurship. I am exceedingly glad to see networks like ABS-CBN and GMA7 picking up the advocacy through shows that push it.

More and more NGOs and foundations are organizing the poor in various localities around the skill of entrepreneurship, sometimes calling it by its time-worn name, livelihood, but infusing into these projects the necessary skills of management, accounting and marketing.

Those shows and organizing efforts are laudable and worthy of the highest awards, but are not enough.

To hasten the process of smashing the culture of dependency, we need to establish Entrepreneurial High Schools.

The Entrepreneurial High School will be one in which math is geared to adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying products and payment for products, science to discovering laws and principles that go into the invention of products, history to uncovering our pre-Hispanic weaving, smelting and trading gifts (and how these gifts were contorted and distorted by the Spaniards and Americans), geography and social studies to studying markets, and languages to talking and writing about ourselves as a people and the products of our minds and hands.

If some congressman or senator is willing to sponsor a bill to establish Entrepreneurial High Schools all over the country, I will help him/her write and push it. These high schools will be the entrepreneurial equivalent of our present Philippine Science High Schools, only hopefully they won’t turn out more doctors, lawyers and military men than entrepreneurs (I’m afraid our science high schools do, more than scientist-inventors).

But even this may not be enough.

Public elementary schools, AFTER extending class hours and reinstating History, Geography and Social Studies, may have to pick up the cudgels by building entrepreneurship into the curriculum as early as Grade 1.

This way, we develop children who are ever ready to produce, market and benefit from their own goods, rather than children who are ever ready, at their parents’ urging, to go begging in the streets.

SO WHAT ABOUT WILLIE?

The issue of begging in the streets and in television studios will begin to beg the question once we have instituted the above remedies.

But in the meantime, we are faced with an enormous social problem.

I would have continued to nonchalantly rant and rail against the culture of dependency had I not, in the past months, been increasingly apprised of the rampant and ever more horrible crimes around us.

It’s bad enough to know that your son’s partner’s iPhone 3GS was snatched in Divisoria while she was talking right into it. The snatching came from behind, she wasn’t even scratched, but the audacity of the crime leaves you with a painful realization about the society you love.

It’s bad enough to learn that your nearest neighbors have been robbed from the side and back of their houses, their iron window grilles jacked or sawed off. Though you yourself are under the protection of your Lord’s angels, you tend to shiver at the thought.

But it’s terrible to know that some young pastor’s neighbor’s son in Bagong Silang was snatched from school, then found dead and unstitched, his organs gone, his parents sent a note saying, “Pasensya na talaga, kelangan lang namin mabuhay.”

And the young pastor knows of at least 10 similar cases both in his neighborhood and in Cavite, police remonstrances notwithstanding -- all done to people AS POOR AS their wrongdoers.

I am at a period in my life when God is passing each and every deeply held or hidden belief in front of my eyes and telling me, “You are wrong. Recant.”

Much as I have always hated charity but pressed as I am by the abominable crimes I see growing around me, not touching me, true, since I am under God’s protection, but injuring, maiming and killing many others -- how can I not start to believe in charity?

When charity is perhaps the only way for these hapless people to get out of their poverty traps, given the powerful forces that have held those traps shut for decades, even centuries?

My innate humaneness prevents me from wanting to slough off the population of the poor to solve their problems.

So I have had to come to the painful conclusion that, prior to the complete solutions we need to struggle against all odds for, there is no other way to save the poor from the crimes that engulf them either as victims or doers except: Charity.

At least some poor -- one soul, one family at a time.

Long before I came to this Bildungsroman, this coming-of-age at 62, our people have been doing charity through the practice of bayanihan -- helping each other, carrying each other’s houses when needed.

In the 1920s, some pioneering young Filipino women put up the Gota de Leche -- which means drop of milk -- an institution dedicated to the proposition that rich women would continuously provide goat’s milk to poor women who had nothing to feed their babies.

In our times, there are entertainers like Willie Revillame who, despite all their bad habits, want sorely to snatch the poor around them from the fate that they themselves suffered early in life, and know no other way to do that than to give them money or secret scholarships.

I honestly wish now that I too had the resources to be as generous as they.

Not all of us may have to come to this point, just as not all of us may want to struggle against the odds for equality of education for the poor; but the call to charity, I believe now, is as legitimate as any.

And charity is nothing but love, so the fifth call must necessarily and simply be:

5. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

***
Part I: A Portrait of Slow Transformation
Part II: The Great Class Divide

Flowers and a Poem for...the Murdered?

Flowers for Leonard Co
by Mila D. Aguilar

Never was one for
Phyla and chordata
Stomata and stigma
But yes, stigmata
That's what drew me.

If you had been
My teacher earlier on
Perhaps I would have
Loved Biology
Or Botany, at least.

But I guess
You were younger.
And we never met.
And now you're gone
With the offer of

These flowers
Which I cannot name.
Would
Your murderers
Knew them better

You'd have been spared.


- November 19,2010
10:00 - 10:15 p.m.

Looking at the RH Bill Objectively

by Mila D. Aguilar

The recent ruckus raised regarding the Reproductive Health Bill, whatever its variation or version, has confused the issue to the delight of its invisible original proponents. To bring the issue back on its feet, firm on the ground it actually stands on, may I humbly show the following figures from the old revered CIA World Factbook, which recently received a beautiful makeover AND 2010 estimates as well.

The first figure is our population: 97,976,603 by July 2010 estimates.

You might howl: terrible! But wait, here’s another one for your delectation: our total land area is: 298,170 sq km.

If you use your math, that would mean 328.59 people PER SQUARE KILOMETER, or 3,043.27 SQUARE METERS for every Filipino.

Does it look like we’re jostling each other out of space?

Of course, population control proponents can very well say we will, if we don’t make our people stop doing babies.

Let’s look at another figure, then:

The CIA World Factbook, latest version, says that our population growth rate is 1.957% (2010 est.). In the chart of national population growth rates, we are number 63.

The country with the highest growth rate is the United Arab Emirates, with 3.69% -- 2.74% above ours. There are 12 countries in the 3% and up category.

Countries 13-62, 49 in all before us, are in the category of 2 to just below 3%.

We are the first country in the category just below 2%. In our category of 1.96% (Philippines)-1.05% (Argentina), there are a total of 65 countries.

In the category of 1% (Seychelles) - .01% (Norfolk Island), there are a total of 71 countries.

In the category of NIL growth, 0 to -7.8, there are a total of 36 countries.

In other words, out of a total of 233 nations of the world, 107, or almost 46% -- approaching half of the countries of the world -- are in danger of not reproducing at all!

On the other hand, only 62 out of 233 nations or 26.6%, less than a third of the nations of the world, may be said to be over-reproducing.

The rest of the world, 65 countries in all or 27.89%, are in a more comfortable margin of reproducing just enough manpower to take over its future! We are in that batch, albeit with the highest population growth rate -- in that batch.

Couldn’t that be another way of looking at world population data with the latest CIA figures?

Now here are even more shocking figures:

Our birth rate is 26.01 births/1,000 population (2010 est.) We are number 64 there. But do you know what our infant mortality rate is? It’s 20.56 deaths/1,000 live births, of which we are number 102 in the world. So how many of those 26.01 births actually survive the world?

But let’s look at another, even more telling figure: our total fertility rate. Can you guess that the 2010 estimate of number of children born to every Filipino woman is:

3.23 children born/woman (2010 est.)?

Your guess was 6, right? No, it’s less than 4; it’s 3.23 children born per Filipino woman.

So what is all that ruckus about the Reproductive Health bill for? Do we even need it? Haven’t our horrorable senators and congressmen checked the CIA World Factbook yet? Has Carlos Celdran?

Reading _Room_ by Emma Donoghue

by Mila D. Aguilar

If I've been silent for a day (on Facebook, that is), it's because I've been reading Room by Emma Donoghue, a novel about growing up as a child of a kidnapped young woman in a hermetically-sealed 11-by-11-foot room.

What got me interested in the book was the case of Elizabeth Fritzl, who had been kept for 24 years as a sex-slave in a dungeon in Austria by her father, emerging as a 42-year-old woman with seven children by him, one of whom died of illness after his gross neglect -- thereafter to be incinerated by him in a heating stove next to the dungeon.

I read and watched every bit of news about the Fritzls almost since the day it burst out in April of 2008 and am still on the lookout for whatever little piece of information I could get about the monster Josef Fritzl or his hapless though rescued daughter Elizabeth and six surviving children/grandchildren.

The book was touted at the conclusion of the Fritzl case as an offshoot of it.

Knowing all the juicy details about the Fritzl case, I got not a little disappointed with the novel. The beginning, and actually the whole perspective of the latter, is novel: it is told from the point of view of the child, who was born in the room and was taught by his mother, at five, how to escape from it and rescue her. He emerges as the novel's unknowing, unwilling and ever-unconscious hero -- superhero, in fact -- even leading her to her own closure by insisting on visiting the room for the last time.

It's a cute way of presenting a highly distressing, intriguing and gripping situation. He manages to escape from his captor, not having known anything about the outside world except what he had seen on TV in his five years in it, tell the police about his mother, and lead them, through a particularly alert and motherly police officer, to his mother, who has stayed in the Room waiting for the rescue.

The plot is well-done, gluing the reader to the novel up to the last sigh of relief, after all the goodbyes are done to every aspect of the tiny Room.

But presenting a situation from the eyes of a five-year-old child, no matter how proficiently, has its limitations.

The characters of the two other protagonists in the novel turn out flat in consequence. Old Nick, the kidnapper, who has kept Ma, Jack's mother, in the prison-room for seven years, cannot be elucidated. Of course, he is more like the kidnapper of Natasha Kampusch than Josef Fritzl, the other Austrian sex-slaver whom we never get to know because he killed himself upon his victim's escape. So perhaps we can forgive the lack of a rounded picture of Old Nick, though he for his part ends up in prison.

But Ma's sudden suicide attempt becomes as much of a conundrum to us as it is to Jack. It could very well happen in real life -- a 26-year-old mother who has brought up her son very well, teaching him not only to read and write but to do very good math as well as providing him with all the physical and vocal exercises she could within the limits of a hidden prison, could very well, after being rescued by him through her own plan, want to kill herself because of a bruising encounter with thoughtless media.

But then, taking into account her son's own narrative, it would seem that she almost deliberately planned the whole scenario for five years, waiting for the opportune moment for him to grow up. Why would she suddenly throw away all her efforts -- and her son's future -- just because of some media meddling?

It could be explained, of course -- as a sudden weakness in character built in even before her kidnapping -- but perhaps not from a little boy's viewpoint.

So what starts out as a cute device doesn't end up cute at all.

And we who know the Fritzl case begin to associate the novel with the true story.

In the true story, Felix, the youngest boy, is also five, and experiences the outside world in much the same way, with the same fascination and wonderment, and the same physical disabilities, described with just much more detail in the novel.

But in the true story, Elizabeth, the mother and incest victim, is heroic all the way. She is not known to have tried to kill herself after rescuing all her children from the clutches of her ogre of a father. And in the true story, we get a rather deep glimpse into the twisted psyche of Josef Fritzl besides.

What is the true story about, why is it so riveting?

It is able, in its most complicated true-to-life fashion, to portray the depths of depravity to which the human soul can descend, as well as the heights of hope, faith and love to which it can aspire.

Room cannot do that, not only because of the viewpoint it has chosen, but because the author herself, by all accounts (see her video), lacks the perspicacity and depth to see these dimensions.

So Room becomes exactly what she intended it to be -- a novel about child development, unfortunately comparable to the Fritzl and, to a minor extent, Kampusch stories because of the many elements she borrowed from both -- without acknowledging it, by the way, in her final book.

Which is a shame. Reading Room is like reading the novels of Paolo Coelho, which I could not for the life of me appreciate. Both make for extremely popular (because, I suspect, easy) reading. Both try but fail to make some meaningful literarily profound statement about life (though Coelho tries harder and literally does, in essay fashion -- in fact he's quoted rather widely on it).

And both will not, I am afraid, outlast this century.

So now let me go back to my Dostoevsky, which I've been trying to re-read without much success on my smartphone -- the same type of device I used to read, with ease, both Room and Coelho.

The Devil is Upon Us

By Mila D. Aguilar

The devil is upon us
He thrives on harmless
Vegetables we keep
To create compost
For our hungry gardens.

The stink will invade
Your noses day to day
Stinging your skin
Developing dots
For microbes to feed on.

But that is not
The worst of it.
Ripe compost produces
Methane, which is odorless
And could kill you

Without your knowing it.
The trick is to
Throw open your windows
So God’s air could come in
And dissipate the gas.

But lock your doors
Lock your doors
For the devil could get you
By climbing the fence
He himself built.

Remember, the devil is with us
Sending warts upon us all.


- May 12, 2010
7:10 - 7:22 am

Answering Denise Levertov

by Mila D. Aguilar


Here, Denise, they don't
Chop off heads by the day
They just waylay you
On some lonely byway
Or highway
As the case may be
Whether you're alone
Or with
A convoy of journalists
Meant to protect your
Filing of candidacy.
One, two, fifty killed
Numbers don't matter
It's the principle that counts:
The principle of power
Over people
Of family
Over fold.
We know
No other life
We are the walking dead
Straddling the centuries
Without remorse
Shouting ourselves hoarse:
Producing nothing.



- November 24, 2009
9:30 - 9:59 pm

Bulwagang Rizal

Bulwagang Rizal
Originally uploaded by mila d aguilar

I HAVE

By Mila D. Aguilar

I have seen you.
Yours is the robe
Glowing white in the sunlight
That I tried to clutch
As you rose to heaven.
But you left me.

In the desert of my soul
You left me
To contend with myself
Till the day
I emerged from the battle
Yearning for you
And then you came
As I sat tired and forlorn
At the edge of my bed.

I could see the skirt
Of your white robe
As your hand touched
My head saying
You're doing fine, it's okay.
I have felt you.

I have heard you.
Not with a voice
But in a breath
Surpassing understanding
As I walked in a dream
Knowing others were
Walking with me.
And you said
In no uncertain terms
That this was how
It was going to be
In the march to Malacanang:
One fine day
We would all arise,
Fully aware,
And start treading
Separately
On your instructions.

I have smelled you
In myself, sweet with love
For your creation,
Exuding care and concern
For all of mankind
Without distinction.

I have tasted you
In my thirst. You
Are my living water.
You flowed into my palms
When first I received you
And confessed I
Was nothing without you.

You fill my mouth
My eyes
My ears
My nose
My skin.
Thereof
I know you. You

Are my God.



April 1, 2009
7:00 - 7:34 am

A Story Of Mothers

By Mila D. Aguilar


My son once had a dog
Not too long ago.
Her name was Helga.
She was a Labrador
Lovable and well-fed.
When she had children,
Still young and bouncy,
My son sold them, eight in all,
Keeping only one, whom he named
Sheik. Sheik it was, when
He'd grown bigger than she,
That she playfully ran away with
One day, the gate having been
Left open. Distraught, only
My prayers and his wife's
And daughter's guiding him,
My son looked far and wide for them,
Tacking wanted posters
With their pictures on walls
And trees, announcing a reward
For their return. We found
The two separately
The week after, Sheik
By a restaurant, haggard
And unkempt, Helga
In a house trembling,
Refusing to eat -- her rescuer,
A kind old woman, said.
By all accounts both
Had managed by their size
To escape from violent men
In passing jeeps.

But at a price.
Each got home days apart
Not only sobered, but
Interminably sad, as if
They had finally discovered
What kind of world they lived in.
Sheik recovered slightly
After some months, drawn
Closer to his mother
Than he had ever been,
But Helga was never the same
Again. After a year, she
Started to bleed. My son's wife
Took her to a vet twice,
Subjecting her to surgery
For the dog had cancer,
She was told. But
It couldn't be helped. Helga
Grew so thin, her big bones
Stuck out, only her belly bulging.
She could hardly move.
I would see Sheik circling round her
All day, his head hanging,
His shoulders draped
Like a sad cloak around him.
He would smell the blood
Trickling out of her the way
Angels prophesy the death of men.

And so one day
We had to bury her.
But we could not bury Sheik's
Anguish. His eyes lost
All gleam forever, his gait lost
Its youth. He started to walk
Like an old man though he was but
Four years old. Like me, up to now
He must still be dreaming
Nightly about his mother,
How they'd walk together in fun
Under the canopy of heaven,
Floating above the folly
Of the world and mortal men,
Wondering why, of all the dead
In one's life, whether it be long
Or short, mothers are missed most.



February 22, 2009
7:35 - 9:05 am

This poem was written expressly for the February 22 memorial to Mommy Adang de la Torre at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani on Quezon Avenue and dedicated especially to Ed and Girlie as well as all those who regarded Mommy de la Torre as their own mother.

Walang Pakundangan

Ni Mila D. Aguilar

A-dos na ng Enero
Nagpapaputok pa rin
Nang walang pakundangan
Mga bata sa lansangan.

Tulad ng kanilang
Matatanda sa Malacanang
Na isa-isang kinakarne
Lahat ng lumalaban.

Lumalabas na ang pulbura
Sa maliliit na butas
Sa gilid ng aking mga mata
Wala pa ring pakiramdam

Bata man o matanda
Sa kanilang kapwa.
Nakasusulasok ang amoy
Pambara sa hininga

Isip mo'y talagang balak nila
Ang makapatay
Ng kapitbahay.
Kung di nga lang ba, oo na,

Inosente itong sa isang banda
At sa kabila ay gahaman
Sa kaban ng bayan. Pero iho,
Sunud-sunuran lang ang kawalan

Sa gawi ng imbing kaharian.



a-2 by Enero, 2008
7-9 n.g.

Your Egypt Is No More

By Mila D. Aguilar

Here you are,
Bowing before the pyramid
When Egypt is no more.
How many decades
Will the genuflection last?
Egypt is now
A relic of the past.

And yet He said
To not God anything
But Him. Bud, what
Are you trying to save
Of Egypt then? The meme?
And where to take it?
On what wall to beam?

Your Egypt's nothing
But library now. Go,
Leave it. Let God move
With His own plan.
If it's another Pharoah,
So be it, fight on
With Heaven in your hand.


October 16-17, 2008

More stories from Iloilo re: Typhoon Frank

Mila Aujero writes again to my sister, this time with pictures taken by a neighbor of Inday Regalado, who is either her friend or relative. Click on the first picture to see three men trying to survive the flood. The second picture shows the aftermath on Inday Regalado's front yard. I have omitted some real names to protect persons who may feel judged. Calamity spares neither rich nor poor; or, for that matter, good nor bad.

--- On Thu, 7/10/08, mila aujero wrote:

Del,

Kon stories lang about baha survivors, haaay endless.
Everybody has a story to tell. Sharing with you some.......

*Remember our classmate Lydia Torre? She was alone
with her nieces at their one story house in Alta Tierra when acc. to her ,suddenly in a split second taga neck na ang flood.All girls sila, nag panic siya.She saw a hose, tied it to
a tree nagkabit kabit sila sa hose for several hours until they were rescued.

*Got a friend who is very rich, xxx, who owns
several gasoline stations and a rice magnate from Pavia.She is a widow surrounded by maids and helpers.
At first she said she was not affected because her walls were secure and strong.In a split second kuno, the walls
fell, the water reached the roof of her single story house,
everything gone. Tapos na baha, gina strain pa kuno niya ang lay-on and mud looking for her alahas worth millions.
all gone .All she can do is cry,esp. that her bodega full of rice wala mapuslan. In short, ginkuha gid ang tanan niya nga material things.Many says gina gaba an siya kay "usurer" man kuno.

* A well known figure in Iloilo City, xxx,owner of xxx, lost 8 cars in their
garage,aside from their destroyed house and things. Many were commenting.... sobra na ina ang 8 cars....kon sa pagkaon gluttony na.

* Carlos Gellekanao, a retired aprominent person also,had been on top of their roof overnight,was not
rescued, gin heart attack.

[NOTE FROM 'KATHY', sent Friday February 20, 2009 2:03 pm (see Comments 3 & 4 below): "He is my father and is very well. Wala gin heart attack as you have described. Yes, he was a victim of typhoon frank having climb to the roof for safety but he did not have a heart attack. Please correct your statement though it is almost a year."]

* Stories have been circulating that a maleta full of jewelries were lost in the flood.The owner kuno was
a Saudi national who was here to sell it to a jewelry store.
Buenas lang to ang nakakita.

* The son of Lope Doromal ,our classmate and president was walking in Balabago on the way to their farm when suddenly the flood taller than him overcame him,he swam
to an unfinished construction and stayed there overnight until he was rescued.

I have a cousin ,a midwife who newly retired from Germany and have just came home, she said she was just resting for the meantime and biding her time to go to the bank to deposit ang dala ya nga kwarta, all in US dollars,
her retirement money. she won't tell the amount basta several thousands gid kuno, all gone, including her passports and everything.Nag overnight pa siya sa top of the roof, wasak ang aparador where she kept her valuables,
her house, the walls and gates.Baw daw buang siya subong

Daw "bombo reporter" na ako, ano? ha ha.

Just see for yourself sa
you tube,typhoon frank iloilo city
search web bala sa internet.

Love,
MIL

In the wake of Typhoon Frank: Letter from Iloilo

I am circulating as is, with her permission, a letter to my sister from Mila Damasco Aujero, a resident of Iloilo, together with the original Ilonggo it contains. I believe that, with a little work on any Filipino's part, the general sense of it can be understood. Not translating other Filipino languages into Tagalog is also a way of evolving Pilipino as a national language. Do write me if you feel I'm wrong.

God bless all!
Mila D. Aguilar

---

2008/7/10, to Delia D. Aguilar:

Dear Del,

Yes !" I cannot agwants the penetents of the kalibuts" expression is really true to the Ilonggos at this time after the calamity. Grabe gid ang pangabuhi namon diri......
since gasoline prices went up, it made a domino effect on everything...from jeepney fares to basic goods.Double gid ang mga prices ,maskin vegetables very scarce, rice also..
...ambot I just cannot describe ,wala pa ko ka experience sini since childhood where you can see everybody suffer,rich and poor....so many stories of survivors sa baha

...may nagatulala under psychiatric care(remember our classmate Elizabeth Pinosa,was-ag gid balay nila,everything gone,nagatulala na lang,incoherent,greatly affected gid....)
may ara nga nagalangot pa buot nila sa mga alahas nila nga wala na,the Jesenas wasak man balay nila and lost everything,subong nagatulala man.......Marilyn Ledesma
also na hospital gid kay non-stop ang hibi ya,naga hysterical pa. Haay damo naga buluang.......

.....may kaladlawan man nga stories like my co teacher at West, until the rooftop na ang baha sa balay nila,so the family has to swim to higher grounds ,sobra nga current sang water pagtakas ya wala na gali sya pants including panties naga "bomba" na sya she didn't notice .....Survival
lang ang sa ulo ya kuno.But now she can laugh telling us.

Damo patay more than a hundred.Many many cars nawasak
indi na mapuslan.Some brand new pa.

......may mga grim stories man,like the cashier of Iloilo Supermart, nagabaha na gin balik ya pa ang money ya sa kaha, na trap sya sang current,patay gid.
* may 2nd year HRM student lady nga tanan niya nga co-boarders ato na sa atop sang balay wala sya ka hingagaw
patay gid sya.
* may 22 years old guy nga patay inspite nga kabakod sang lawas ya.Balikbayan pa,bag o lang nag abot from the states.Daw maano ang family.
The water was 10 to 13 ft. high very strong pa ang current
ano abi agwanta mo?maskin good swimmer ka pa.

------So many are wondering what the meaning of all these.
They say perhaps the Illonggos are too comfortable and
complacent with their lives that they need reminders.
Patilawon man kuno mga Ilonggos.

It's a good thing wala kami iya casualty diri sa amon.Ang baha di up to the bust only.May 2nd story balay namon,ti wala kami iya ka swim like the others.However,at this time ubos gid wasak mga gamit,got no more ref,washing machine,two sala sets,gas range, halos everything.

.For 2 weeks no electricity.Up to now no water.Very expensive pa magbakal tubig,it's a precious thing at this
time .We learn to bathe sa isa ka balde lang.

Del, agwanta gid mo! The city gov't. has this slogan...
"Bangon,Iloilo.".....

Hope you have enough time to read this long letter.

Love,
MIL

Ka Bel

by Mila D. Aguilar

Using too much of his head
He fell on it one day,
Blood oozing from the
Orifices he had used
To sense the world.

How I wish he had
Used more of his heart
Though he did,
Incontrovertibly he did.
It went to those

Who used their hands,
Like him, to yank
Steel bars out from stiffened,
Remorseless cement.
And that is why

His own arteries
Had hardened.
Would not have happened
Had he stirred that part
Of the heart

That ticks to heaven.
And yet he is forgiven
For he lived by the laws
Of the God he could not quite
Imagine.


- May 22, 2008
10:00 am-12:30 pm
On the way from Quezon City to Aurora Province,
remembering Romans 2:14-15

She’s done for

She’s done for. It’s in the air. Everybody can feel it.

All except the clique that rules with her.

We don’t know how much more time it will take, but it won’t be long now.

In the face of such an event, what are we who are ordinary citizens supposed to do?

The answer is very simple: we should have registered our disgust over the present administration in the first place, long ago. There is still time to do so, but now the situation demands much more of us than just a registration of disgust.

We have to make it clear that we are not only saying No to Gloria; we have to shout, in our loudest voices, that we are saying NEVER to CORRUPTION – not never again, but NEVER, period.

For Gloria and her family, both official and ministerial, merely epitomize the rank corruption in our midst. They demonstrate to us the depths to which we have gone as a nation. They are the prime symbols of the pay-offs, the buy-outs, the suhol, the “hingi, hingi” that transpire everyday in our midst.

We cannot advance further as a nation if we do not unseat them.

At the same time, we all know that Gloria is not the end of corruption. Already, as history has shown time and again, deals are most likely being made to replace her. And we know that those who will most likely replace her will be just as corrupt, if not worse.

However, the prospect should not stop us from pushing for Gloria’s ouster; it should in fact urge us to go one step further after her ouster.

We cannot tire of the process of regime change, just because the regime that confronts us is not the ideal we strive for. On the contrary, with every regime change we must learn with better sense how to expunge the corruption in our midst.

Our mistake so far has been to think that corruption lies in our politics alone.

But the corruption lies not in our politics so much as in our economics (for politics is merely the external structure built on economics):

Our politicians can be blatantly corrupt because they cultivate a slew of dependents around them. These dependents are so abject that they could not object to whatever the politician does in their name.

Remove the dependents, and the politicians will be forced to deal instead with ideas for the betterment of the nation.

We have already proceeded a little farther away from charity – giving our people fish – to teaching them how to fish. Let us move even farther off, removing relations of dependency altogether by teaching our people how to market the fish – not only live fish but pickled, dried, or salted in attractively-designed packages, by the hundreds of thousands.

In order to remove relations of dependency between politicians and our people altogether, we cannot have just a few of these marketers of fish, even if they were to grow to be the biggest entrepreneurs. We have to have at least a million of them for a start, in fact an increasing number through the years.

For the politicians certainly have more than a million under their thumbs.

We should therefore demand, right now, from those who are poised to take over the Arroyo administration, a veritable program that will encourage an entrepreneurial mass movement. Those of them that carry one are those who understand the true nature of our problems, and therefore deserve our encouragement and support.

This entrepreneurial mass movement should push for and encourage both family and community enterprises using raw materials that are already found in the Philippines. All agencies of the government can and should be mobilized towards this goal.

Legislation in aid of the entrepreneurial mass movement should be instituted, among the most necessary of which are:

• The establishment of computerized one-stop registration shops in all towns and cities without the hassle of “suhol”;
• The minimization of registration fees and bureaucracy not only for small and medium, but large-scale entrepreneurs, whether foreign or local;
• Five-year tax incentives for small and medium-scale entrepreneurs, provided they are Filipino citizens;
• The establishment of entrepreneurial high schools modeled after the community schools of the late forties and early fifties, with parents, teachers and barrio/town officials working in concert with students in establishing small enterprises;
• The establishment of entrepreneurial communities all over the Philippines.

We must warn politicians, whether they are in power or waiting in the sidelines, that an entrepreneurial movement HAS started among the ranks at least of the middle classes and overseas Filipinos, and may get to the ranks of the masses soon enough. If they do not heed the signs of the times, they may get run over by this movement without their knowing it. The best way to survive is to recognize it as the long-term solution to the problem of corruption and poverty, and to be active in its implementation.

Now that we have a long-term positive alternative to the Arroyo administration, make your next move, Trapo.

And you too, ordinary citizen. ACT NOW, before it's too late.

Time to Act

You may have heard about what is presently happening in the Philippines. Below, for your information, is an exchange that I'm sure is happening many times over right now, in the country and without. For full appreciation, you may want to read the second letter first.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mila D. Aguilar
Date: Feb 9, 2008 12:46 PM

Dear Ben,

Amen and amen! But our recommendations and actions have to be not only concrete, but actual and physical. We can and should pray every step of the way, but God already answered what we should be doing long ago; he's been waiting for us to act.

The present situation calls for present action. If we do not act now, more and more of our people will think that corruption is the only way to go. If we do not show, by dislodging the corrupt from our midst, that corruption cannot and must not thrive, more and more of our people will feel that they too can get away with their petty sins. And as more and more of our people become corrupt, more and more of the honest will want to leave our country to the dogs and the foreigners.

We have to act now, and act fast, or our medium and long-term programs will come to naught.

Though we must not forget that the final answer is economic, we must remember that the present pressing problem is political. Once we have shown that corruption in the Philippines has been excised, no matter how roughly for now, we can go on with building our plural, responsible, and solidarity-based society.

Let me reiterate what I have advocated since 1999:

Corruption and poverty in our country feed on each other, but cannot survive once we have built a strong base of entrepreneurs. For once these entrepreneurs create wealth for the nation that can equal if not surpass the remittances of our hapless overseas Filipinos, poverty can be minimized. And once poverty has been minimized, corruption cannot thrive, for corruption thrives only on the dependency of the poor.

This is how concrete our medium and long-term program has to be. Some, like the Global Filipino Nation, can be even more specific: they are targeting the growth of medium-scale entrepreneurs. I, for my part personally, would rather spread the consciousness and practice of entrepreneurship among the masses through an entrepreneurial mass movement.

It's a chicken-or-egg situation, but the egg has been laid, and not only is it golden -- it can produce many more. Now it's time to go after the neck of that chicken.

Let us pray that the hand of God will guide us in our figurative neck-cutting.

God bless the Philippines!
Mila


On Feb 9, 2008 11:54 AM, Benjamin Quinones wrote:
Dear Claribel,

I received today through my mobile phone your text as follows: "Ben, What should be our response to these outrageous corruption scandals? Collective silence or collective action? -- Claribel David"

My mobile phone load is down to zero, I can't text you back, so I resorted to this email reply. First of all, I'd like to say I admire your courage in asking this question. Because the answer to your question is obvious from the way you framed it.

How can we keep silent when our future, especially our children's future is already compromised? How can we not take action when own country and people are looking for answers and alternatives to the existing bankrupt system, and part of that answer is in our hands? We have been advocating for a plural, responsible, and solidadrity-based society. We cannot dissociate that advocacy from what is currently transpiring in the country. Instead of folding down our banners and keeping silent, we should all the more intensify our advocacy. We cannot shirk from that social responsibility, we cannot turn our backs from the call to take a collective, constructive action.

But what kind of collective action? I believe in presenting the Filipino people a sustainable alternative. I believe in sharing with them a vision for the future that will move them to act for their own families, their communities, their country. I don't think people will respond to another short term palliative like the previous EDSA people's power action They are looking for something that will last, not only for themselves but most especially for their children and their children's children.

One of the reasons why I proposed a quarterly learning journey as a major agenda for our partners meeting in March 28 is to enable us to work together in a persistent move of rallying people to our cause for an other, solidarity-based society. We have a cause, we believe in sharing this cause to the Filipino masses, so that they will have the means and the collective will to overcome oppressive conditions. I'm sure our colleagues - Jun Simon, Pinky Cupino and her group, the Christian Businessmen's Forum Intl, EBEST and others will close ranks with us in this initiative. We should conduct the learning journey consistently as a means for mobilizing people towards an organized engagement of existing power structures in a constructive manner. The initiative we are taking is not necessarily risk-free. Every progressive move is risky.

We cannot change the scandalous situation in the country overnight. But we can commit to a persistent
collective action that could rally more and more people towards a plural, responsible, and solidarity-based society.

Blessings,
Ben

Arise, shine, for your light has come
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1


--
When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

- Matthew 10:19-22

Vallorbe in real life

The waters rage outside the caves of Vallorbe.

It Was the Caves of Vallorbe

By Mila D. Aguilar


It was the caves of Vallorbe
Les grottes de Vallorbe
That did me in.

That did me in,
Les grottes de Vallorbe
The cold of

The beautiful caves
Of Vallorbe.
The icy handrails

Of the caves of Vallorbe.
I hardly noticed
As I trekked up and down

The steel steps
Des grottes de Vallorbe
Admiring the

Stalactites and stalagmites
The odd formations
That produced not

One precious stone
That my back had clogged
That my butt had clogged

With the steely cold
Of the caves of Vallorbe.
And it did me in,

That was what did me in,
The icy cold
Of the caves of Vallorbe.



Saturday, August 18, 2007
2:46:51 AM
Philippine Time
Written at the airport in Frankfurt on a two-hour stopover of the flight from Geneva to Manila.