isla

This was a long post I gave in the Soli e-group, after a long trip in the Southern Philippines.
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Going on a long trip alone is bliss. You get to be at home in places where you've never been before. You commune with nature, inhale the various atmospheres of assorted places and you get to discern and appreciate the faces of people of diverse regions. The spectrum of every place dims the gloom of an otherwise lonely predicament. On travel, you get to be in touch with yourself.

Now no words can substitute pictures in your memory, nor can they evoke in others the pristine feeling of moments in awe. At, for example, the lush beauty of Mindanao, of passing through the rolling green hills of Bukidnon, of being amazed at a cave in the middle of the city, of passing through a road that's a mystery. There's nothing like seeing the sun rise in Surigao - and witnessing the same sun set somewhere in the sea, viewed from a RORO boat going to Mindoro. Have you seen the movie "Heaven and Earth?" Well, it looks like Negros when you rush through on a bus, where the rice fields in the movie are replaced with sugarcane leaves waving in the air. At the background are clouds kissing a low mountain. .

Meeting with friends and new people also provide spice. They serve as knowledgeable tour guides for sure, and adds pizzazz to your traveling experience. Plus the enjoyable company - even for a few days or a few hours - gets you going, especially in the metropolitan areas. The feral nightlife in places like Davao and Cebu, and Bacolod would of course not pass without comment.

The customs, the food, the dialects, the church buildings and mosques, even the madness of markets remind you of the cultural richness of your land. You realize that the Philippines is composed of more than 7,100 islands, a diversified array, even if intellectually you grasp its oneness. You also sense your country is a foreign one, even though you know it is home. Being a foreigner who did not speak the local language, I also had fun passing off a few words like pila? (how much?) and a few expressions of apparent acknowledgement. Although, if people asked me directly, I'd draw a blank face, then tell them "Tagalog" and point to myself, haha! People are normally helpful and would extend aid to any direction you ask.

The trip I took was not totally the backpack trekking type where you wander off to places where you don't know people. It's really a load off when you get to be adopted by people you know and trust, even for just a few days.

Ay, I don't want to finish this, I had some fun moments and lasting memories, but it's for me na lang, baka makilala nyo pa pagkatao ko, hehe. I wrote some things in a notebook diary, dun na lang yun, and anyway I promised this to be a commentary on the social aspects. So here goes.

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On the road, one goes through town after town observing people in their natural settings. It's a separate world that is seemingly unaffected by the imperatives of the political center, metropolitan Manila. Yet to tune in to that world, people get a peek – through media, especially television. And one notices that the news and programs like variety shows and telenovelas, are so far removed, having nothing to do with people's own lives. Now don't get me wrong, I watch variety shows, but I am also aware that these programs serve as escapist entertainment, and function to inculcate the social values of passivity, consumerism, belief in luck and superstition, submissiveness, greed, personal gain and other values that undermine true solidarity. The effect is to distract the masses from things that could maybe negatively affect their lives.

Decisions are made, for example, in the center and people just learn about them – if they ever do. That's actually existing democracy. Representatives are in fact taken from the elite families of each province; the rest of the population only has to grace on one occasion – election time. The rest of the time, it's unwelcome for them to assert themselves, as for example in rallies, derided as a disturbance of the peace - rightly so, but in a different sense. The true mass media serve to reroute people's attention away from reality. If they see too much of it, they might establish in their minds to do something to change it.

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There are terms in social discourse that are used remotely far from their literal meaning.

We've seen democracy in practice. Take another term: development.

Mindanao is a land of promise. It is also a land bitterly contested by its people on one side and the government and big business on the other. As in the Cordilleras, development means the exploitation of resources by multinational corporations for profit. The benefits are to hulks of ever-increasing power while the costs are to the people living there. These costs are not something like durian, which tastes like heaven and smells like hell. It's just hell. In Mindanao it has meant war, displacement of whole communities, interruption of classes and economic activities, not to mention the trauma in the face of atrocities. While conveniently forwarded as a war against terrorism (another contradictory term), rarely mentioned are the American investments in Mindanao. I don't know the exact figures, but it runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the war recently in the Southern Mindanao territory, a contested area included the Liguasan Marsh, a space of vast natural gas and oil potential. Locals are aware of this factor that's got the AFP and the MILF (which would need the resource in its goal of self-determination) fighting, and yet the general public is ignorant of the fact. It explains the presence of American forces as well.

There's this correlation between massive militarization and "development" projects. Along with national discrimination, the outcome has not been pretty. In the 80s, there were these CIA-created orcs – the vigilantes, Alsa Masa. The sordid details of what they did are just that, too grotesque for words. The pattern is typical – as is the inability to perceive it.



It was all in the name of anti-Muslim and anti-communist insurgency. Military decision-makers never question this basic doctrine, though foot soldiers do ask why. But on the general level, it isn't challenged. It's taken like the rising and setting of the sun - which we know to be an illusion, when seen from a cosmic perspective. It is convenient to have ready-made enemies.



Now take note of that. Communists can be anyone protesting government policies. They can be Church people advocating human rights. So that in the 80s an Italian priest in Kidapawan, Fr. Tullio Favalli, was shot in the head and had his brains eaten, a subject of the movie, Orapronobis. There's no end to such atrocities, but now they're fashionably called terrorists. Just last year, student journalist and human rights advocate Benjaline Hernandez of the CEGP was murdered while investigating harassment of farmers. The convenient excuse was that she was a member of the New People's Army and was shot in combat, even though all the evidence from the Commission on Human Rights points to summary execution.



Now let's look at that term, terrorist. Whatever it may connote, there's a point that has to be made: It's an irony of grand proportions that the war against terror is being carried out by the very perpetrators of terror. Human rights groups claim that the government, with its police, military and other repressive instruments, has been the biggest human rights violator in the country. The conclusion is reinforced by survivors of Martial Law and present human rights victims.

Organizers of progressive groups are constantly harassed and murdered. In Mindoro, people I was honored to have been with during fieldwork, Eddie Gumanoy and Eden Marcellana, peasant leader and human rights activist, were 'salvaged.' Salvaged, no doubt, from their wrong-headed belief in land for the tiller and the right to life.

The atrocities are gravely numerous – in stark contrast to the number of people who protested them, or the cosmetic reaction of the government.

The outcome flows from policies that increasingly militarize society, as seen from the checkpoints going in and out of Cotabato to the entry points to Manila. The alarming trend, say civil libertarians, is also apparent in the revival of a National ID system. The tactic is to whip up fear and anxiety among the population so that people accept what is essentially the encroachment on civil liberties and other democratic rights. The goals are not hard to fathom: it's to keep people in line, to further limit the legal space for the growth of democratic rights, to keep just peace at bay and to prevent independent movements that seek to alleviate the problems of the victims of government policies.

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The doublespeak is intended to make it hard to find words to describe matters of social import, and is effective in obfuscating reality and understanding that would be instrumental in changing it.

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Now policies would look like a sequence of confused ideas unless you understand that they're created to press forward the interests of foreign investors and reinforce the classical pattern - a few islands of rich and power amid a sea of poverty and lack of social opportunity. In terms understood by political economists: political and economic power is in the hands of the bourgeois comprador, the landlord class and their foreign masters, while the democratic and progressive classes have to make do with the rest. That's the model for the Third World. This should be lecture one of any honest social science or economics course.

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Those in power would like it very much for us to just shut up. That's why the frequent cases of violations of freedom of the press, important to keep it in line. That's why unless it's in the form of the corporate media, dissenting opinion would be frowned upon. For now, we're formally democratic, so there's very limited space to maneuver in.

We'd make it very uncomfortable for them if we can't keep our mouths shut, if our creative minds keep flowing freely, and if we keep focusing on matters of social significance. Other ways that we've tried, like establishing an alliance, can aid greatly in social transformation. Things start to change when a group of people with common goals come together, multiply their effectiveness, basically unite and struggle. That's the way things change. Every right we enjoy wasn't given at the beginning of time; they're the amassed outcome of long and hard struggle.

But the thing is that it's got to be sustained and organized. We should argue our differences but keep in mind that there are bigger forces out there that we need to confront and that need our unity.

We shouldn't shun and undermine forms of collective action like rallies. Those in power already recoil from such actions that are left to us. They hate it more if we keep learning, keep organizing and keep doing things for the people in our goal of expanding the arena for freedom of expression and students' and people's rights.

Every wrong, every injustice rightly deserves condemnation, no matter how physically tiring. It should go without saying that we're responsible for our actions and their consequences. So we should be watchful in making, uttering or condoning justifications that entrench those in power, to the detriment of the rest of the people.



We don't really know if what we're doing will stop or even reduce the typhoons that constantly thrash people's lives. We can be certain, though, that doing nothing would guarantee that floods will come, inundating the very world we stood so dearly upon.

The safeguarding of basic rights will not be determined by an oracle, but will be greatly affected by steadfast commitment to the people, critical thinking, and collective action.



Caesar





P.S. Pahabol, you know, we have no architectural tradition. Pagkita mo ng mga bahay parang sinalpak na lang siya at di na talaga plinano, basta may matirhan. Syempre marami pa diskurso dito pero napansin ko lang.

P.P.S. Pansinin nyo pala yung mga ports na pinangalanan ni GMA sa Mama niya, syempre yung Diosdado Macapagal Highway at airport pa. Pati syempre yung P200 bill.

Maganda siya gawan ng article. Mga gumagawa lang nun mga katulad ni Saddam.

Siguro she has to magnify her smallness.





X Wherever you are, make sure you are there – M. Gandhi



X Unity means strength. Division means weakness – Ho Chi Minh



X …and the truth shall set your free – the Christian Bible