By my personal assessment, Roxas, though a scion of the aristocratic Roxas and Araneta families, is one of the more progressive than the other candidates because of his close association with maverick legislators like partymate Rep. Erin Tañada, himself a member of a distinguished clan of nationalist politicians, a former student leader and current Chair of the House Committee on Human Rights. I've met Tañada twice and even then he had been endorsing his fellow Liberal so I figured, if Erin likes him maybe he's got something there.
Unfortunately, Mar didn't stay too long. After an entrance fit for a ead of State, he made a brief speech in his distinctly Ilonggo accent thanking everyone for coming and apologizing that he had to be home by noon as Korina was waiting for him in Manila. But he was still kind enough to stay for some picture taking and autograph signing as everyone in the jam-packed room mobbed him.
The questions were left to NIPS Director Lambert Ramirez who admitted that he wasn't really authoritative on the candidate's views but whose answers i suppose was congruent with the party line. Concerned student that I am, I asked him about their plans on tution fee increase and the commercialization of education. He replied by saying how ticklish the tuition fee issue was and that Sen. Roxas had already consulted with the National Union of Students of the Philippines and was tilting toward socialized tuition fees (which I think is applicaple only to State Universities). Then the forum went back to the LP's networking campaign strategy for 2010.
Let us digress for a while. Once upon a time, freshman year in college to be more specific, I was a staunch advocate of Charter Change aka Cha-Cha. I would argue with anyone who challenged my views, even if it meant it was the whole class. The Philippines was a mess and everyone knew it.Change was something we needed, I reasoned, and change should begin with the Constitution that serves as the framework of our political system. Parliamentary government will reduce deadlocks between legislature and executive, Federalism will free up the supressed energies of local government and Charter Change was, as I pointed out in a term paper, justified by Aristotle's political philosophy.
Fast forward to the present and you see me now as an active member of the No to Con-
Ass Facebook group and trashtalking pro-ConAss lawmakers whenever I have the chance. Why the about face? I realized that you need more than just Charter Change to fix this country. No, I'm not into the "It's not the system but it's the people" thing. Our political and economic woes go beyond our Constitution and is deeply rooted in the very structure of our society. We can't get anywhere without dismantling elite rule which has thrived in Philippine politics no matter how many times we changed constitutions. However, middle class thinking, which was initially mu stanpoint, sees things differently. Recognizing the need for change but reluctant to take steps that might drastically alter the status quo, Charter Change is the easy answer.This is the kind of thinking i see in the LP, as the answers to my questions show. Most of the Liberals' position are cautious middle-of-the-road compromises. They are against Con-Ass but push for Charter Change through Con-Con. They are concerned with agrarian reform but prefer extending and reforming the gradualist CARP instead of the more forceful GARB. Like any mainstream party, they are also quiet on political dynasties.
We keep on hearing how the 2010 polls will bring change. That's a given, but maybe we should also be thinking about how far we ought to go. Perhaps the more progressive presidentiables should be more progressive.
It has been months since my last post. It's not that my highly sensitive sense of moral outrage has lessened. I'm just either too busy or too lazy. But I digress.
All these cheesy commercials keep reminding us that the bourgeois charade of democracy called the elections are now near enough for the numerous presidential aspirants to obsess themselves with catching the public eye. It seemed only yesterday that candidates tried to outdo each other in projecting the hip pro-youth persona by championing education and the kabataan. Again we find sanctimonious political dinosaurs lecturing young people on how much the country needs them, about how we need to be involved in choosing our leaders, how they are so unselfishly committed to the cause of future generations and how crucial the youth vote will be in 2010.
Please. Tell that to the schoolchildren who trek for five hours to get to their dilapidated schoolhouse and share their textbook with three other classmates, to the families of the murdered student leaders and campus journalists whose killers remain at large. Tell it to the university student who has to quit school because he couldn't affor to pay for his "right to quality education" and tell that to the girl who got pregnant and doesn't know who the father is or the gay kid who can't go inside his school for "cross-dressing". I supose I'm not the only one feeling too busy or too lazy.
Pardon my cynicism but as a Political Science Major and student of Philippine Politics, I have lost the luxury of blissful ignorance. A semester and a pile of reading materials on this subject and I look at the beleaguered Arroyo Administration besieged by Hello Garci and ZTE and I flash back to the 1950s when Elpidio Quirino facing accusations of fraud and violence in the 1949 elections (which by the way is considered the dirtiest Philippine election, that is, until Marcos took dirty to new heights) as well as numerous graft scandals finds an impeachment complaint in the House of Representatives with his name on it. Familiarly, his Congressional lap dogs squashed the complaint when it was put into a vote an omen of things to come. My bottom line, it all happened before and it's all gonna happen again. Even if we keep reshuffling the people we're all doomed unless we change the system.
Of course, like any good Catholic, i give the politicians the benefit of the doubt and to see what they had to say for themselves I stayed up to watch the ANC Leadership Forum last night where rumored presidentiables(actually announcing candidacy would prevent them from prematurely campaigning after all) answered a few queries courtesy of ANC and the Ateneo School of Government. Present were Senators Mar Roxas, Chiz Escudero, Dick Gordon; Governor Ed Panlilio and Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro. MMDA Chairman Bayani Fernando, Mayor Jejomar Binay and Sen. Ping Lacson were also invited buts sadly couldn't make it.The questions ranged from the personal (What was the last book you read/movie you watched, Which person inspires you?) to the serious political ones (Would you join a coalition with Manny Pacquiao's Party?Do you support an investigation on the Arroyos alleged corruption?).
Ex-priest Among Ed sounded, expectedly enough, like our parish priest. He talked about St. Paul's open minded leadership style and how corruption is not just endemic to government but in the whole of society and requires a regeneration of moral fiber to combat. Gordon appeared dull and boring, perhaps overshadowed by his more charismatic fellow speakers. He kept on droning about Thomas More and Lord Acton while the moderator was calling the time. He did give an emotional account on how his father, the American-born mayor of Olongapo killed by political opponents, inspired him to enter public service, choking up when he quoted Lorenzo Tañada's eulogy for him ("He was born American, but raised a Filipino and died a Filipino"). Mar Roxas, was the one most obviously gunning for the presidency and you could feel the pressure he was in to get the limelight. His answers were insightful but Escudero got more laughs. Well, except for his melodramatic defense that he was marrying Korina Sanchez for love and not political gain. Chiz was the darling of the crowd, drawing chuckles even as he made veiled attacks on the President. Asked the Pacquiao question he bluntly replied he would support the People's Champ, as long as he's not with the one he visited at Malacañang earlier in the day. Asked the movie question and he answered "Kasal, Kasali, Kasalo".
Arroyo herself wasn't there but the shadow of her presidency was ever looming especially for Admin ally Teodoro. "Gibo" Teodoro dutifully took up the cudgels for the President, extolling her many achievements (i.e. the usual fare: infrastructure, 7.3% GDP growth in 2007, peace and order blah, blah, blah...) and expressing his support on a probe on her family but cautioning that if it was only political harassment "I will protect my President." Mr. Palengke Roxas and Gordon focused on their personal relationship with the President, Mr. Palengke admitting she supported him against the cement and pharmaceutical cartels while DTI Secretary and Gordon about how they used to work together in the Senate. Panlilio discoursed about the inherent goodness found in everyone and praised Arroyo for her commitment to the environment through the Solid Waste Management Act and the Alternative Fuels Law. (I suppose Among Ed isn't familiar with the trouble in the Tañon Strait which is nothing but an outgrowth of her neoliberal policies, but i don't take that against him).
My evaluation? Chiz scored with the audience and all the rest were struggling to get a piece of the attention. Teodoro, particularly, passed off as little more than an Administration lackey, which is not good as negative SWS ratings dog his boss. Mar tried to get noticed but, let's just say he can still catch up with the publicity from the upcoming wedding of the century. But all in all, everyone was playing safe. Nothing much about Cha-Cha, Human rights, Extrajudicial kilings, Agrarian reform or any profound critique on the Philippine economy, society or political system. Nobody said anything about the Tuition Moratorium Bill or the Magna Carta for Students, not even about the Reproductive Health Bill. But yes, there was the usual appeal to the delicious chunk of two million first-time voters (which include me by the way) and their youthful compatriots.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not discouraging young people from voting. Your friendly neighborhood cynic is just telling all the young voters to not put their hopes up too high. If you really want change through the ballot, first, pray like hell that the polls will be clean. Next, pray like hell the people who get elected are clean. Then, pray like hell the next elections will be clean. Repeat steps 1 and 2 indefinitely. It's a long shot but, hey, nobody said change through the ballot was quick and introducing profound changes to the system is really messy and not that sexy compared to all the cool star-studded political ads and campaign jingles. As for me, I prefer to put my vote where it won't be wasted like on Kabataan Party-list, our sectoral organization who just recently was awarded a seat in Congress by the Supreme Court after years of litigation (and God knows how many more years of endless struggle before that). In fact, I' m going to get registered, when I'm not either too busy or too lazy.
I never realized that nosing around our Department secretary's desk would be rewarding but I found some interesting finds. One was a memo from the Planning and Development Office. Apparently, Fr. Rod Salazar is wondering aloud whether USC should increase its tuition seeing as other Universities in Cebu are either freezing any increase or, like University of the Visayas and University of Cebu, are actually lowering tuition for the next year. UC's Augustus Go was quite proud of this accomplishment that he ran a full page ad on Sun.Star. Fr. Rod ends his memo with a brief appeal to the Holy Spirit for guidance in this dilemma and the Admin sure is going to need it, torn as they are between the College Faculty Association's call for salary increases and the usually adamant students who don't want a tuition fee hike as well as the looming Financial Crisis that's already starting to creep into Cebu.
But the real jackpot find I got was the memo from the top guy Fr. President Dionisio Miranda, SVD, MA, STD himself. It said that the remaining Departments of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and some Admin offices would be transferred to the Talamban Campus by the summer of 2009. That means the Departments of Political Science, Psychology, Economics, Sociology-Anthropology, Religious Education, History, Philosophy, Languages and Literature and Library Science are going to pack up and transfer to TC along with the Offices of the President, Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs, Administration and Finance, the Registrar, Admissions Human Resources, etc. In short, only Commerce and Law and the Research Offices will be left behind. This is HUGE!!
Understandably, reactions were quite strong. A classmate of mine cannot but help express her sentiments in the most effective manner available: a Friendster Bulletin. Our longtime law professor, the (in)famous Atty. Aresnio Tan went so far as to tell us that next year he would quit teaching as Talamban is too far away for him. Now that's a real bummer as the guy's an institution in the Political Science Department. It's been widely accepted that if you are one of the select few who pass his subjects then, and only then, can you really consider a career in law. Not that I have anything against our lower years but it wouldn't be fair if they didn't go through what we went through!! And then there were the whines of people who didn't want to switch dorms, the outright threat to shift to another course just to stay in the same campus, the calls for a petition against the transfer and there was one query addressed to me if the Student Council was consulted in this matter.
Personally, I'm quite undecided on how to take all of this. I always liked Talamban's laid back atmosphere and its wide open spaces as contrasted to the Main Campus where all the congestion and pollution of the city salute you when you step outside. But I can't deny that Talamban, for all the amazing development it's had in recent years, is still at some distance from civilization, or at least the kind of civilization we Main people gotten ourselves used to. And the traffic, don't get me started on the traffic. Not even the new flyover will soothe the massive hordes of vehicles
after the transfer. Then, the floods, the floods we were fortunate enough to avoid in first year when we had our Biology there in the first semster. We were lucky the weather wasn't rainy that time.
But no doubt I'm gonna miss Main. I'm gonna miss P. del Rosario, Junquera, Sanciangko and Pelaez. Looks like it's goodbye to Bernard Wrocklage, Theodore Buttenbruch, Ernest Hoerdemann and Albert van Gansewinkel and hello to Bunzel, Rigney and company. I'm gonna miss Angel Mae's where I've been having lunch for three years. No more riding the ferry for me too. But as the memo said, migration will be completed by summer of 2009. So it's time to say my goodbyes and accept the change that's in front of me. Wait a second, their leaving the Law Library at the Main?!
I miss my old High School Batchmates. Being immersed in this Hellhole of a college with its mountains of papers to submit and exams to study for (which is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing right now), makes me feel some nostalgia to the carefree days of High School when i could make the Honor's list without passing any projects and all the books we had to read could be retrieved out of my trusty backpack. Nowadays, miss a single paper and your grade plunges to the abyss and you have to spend half a school day wandering around hunting for reading materials you need to have a photocopy of for tomorrow's exam.
Speaking of wandering around, back in High School you had your own room where you could stay for the whole day with your own people to chill with, unlike in college where you spend a full one-fourth of the day just looking for a place to chill. And the people, college people are like boarders in a dormitory(which most of them are really). One minute there here, a second later their off to class or to a watering hole or a mall or God knows where. High School people, on the other hand, you're stuck with them so you might as well make the best of it and join them in their plot to sneak past the unsuspecting security guard to a wonderful place wher you can all play DOTA...
Yes, those were the days. Which is why I always look forward to reunions with my high school buddies although College cruelty truly knows no bounds and keeps me so busy that when a text message tells me to go to this place where my batchmates will be trooping together I can only sigh and grumble about having to finish my case digests so I can't come. Fortunately, I run into them from time to time, while wating for the ferry, at the V-hire terminal, even in school, some of my batchmates go to the same university as me after all. I welcome these chance encounters very much although lately I find these quite unsettling, honestly.
When we get together, conversation inevitably wanders to our other batchmates. Earlier I would hear things like, "Did you hear? So-and-so is a Dean's Lister!" or "Well, So-and-so and his girl are still together." Pretty usual stuff punctuated now and then by a few more out of the blue remarks like "So-and-so and Blah-blah-blah broke up!" and "So-and-so stopped schooling this semester." But the unsettling part is the shocking "SO-AND-SO GOT PREGNANT!!". And its getting more and more frequent.
But of course, by saying I'm not making any judgements in any way. PMS happens with people my age and I'm perfectly aware of that. A lot of mornings, usually the one after Valentine's, I wake up and wonder how many people I know got laid last night for some reason. I can be quite loony sometimes. Anyway, this isn't just speculation i have the statistics to prove that more young people are having sex and people who have sex are getting younger. For Example, the 2002 State of the Philippine Population Report said 16% of young people had sexual encounters before age 15, and that was like six years ago. Plus, the Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study concluded that the mean age of sexual encounters were 17 for males and 18 for females (as a side note it also said pornographic acculturation occurs at a mean age of 15 quite high by my estimates.. ;D).
But I'm boring you with numbers, suffice it to say more young people are having sex and as a consequence, more young people are getting pregnant and I can attest to that personally. This is why we need to do something about this problem and don't talk to me about moral renewal or something. That's the Church's job and frankly, if it did its job there wouldn't have been a problem. We don't need some Manichaean moralizing on the evils of the flesh. What we need is a concrete government policy to address this problem of teenage pregnancy and that's why i have always suported the really controversial, but gradually being forgotten, House Bill 5043 or the (in)famous Reporductive Health Bill. I won't go into the details of this piece of legislation, having done so lots of times before somewhere else, but I will say that it isn't like the old Population Control Bills that preceded it. It focuses, as the title suggests, on Reproductive Health and any population result there would just be a positive externality. One of its provisions also mandate reproductive health and sexuality education for students beginning the Fifth Grade, which is actually already available in some schools - I had reproductive and sexuality topics integrated in some of my subjects way back Grade 4. This is especially aimed at young people who honestly don't know what they're getting into when they "get into it".
That's why let's all urge for the passage of HB 5043. I did my part. The USC-SSC passed a resolution expressing support for the Bill authored by myself and co-sponsored by my colleagues Hon. Rojas and Hon. Kho. I also sent a copy to the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN) to show our solidarity with other sectors in pushsing for the passage of the RH Bill. Until then, I'm hoping that the next time I cross paths with a High School friend, we can talk about a batchmate who won a beauty pageant or something.
And so ends 2008 and so begins 2009. As another year ends, yet another begins to take its place. Change is the only thing constant,as they say, and the changing of the calendar has been constant since human beings invented the things.
An endless cycle of beginning and end that's what this all is. Sounds pretty harmless at first, but once you think about it, it starts to look real scary.
Imagine, being trapped in a never-ending cycle, condemned to keep beginning, then ending and then beginning again, ending that beginning and just repeating that cycle on and on. Just like that guy from Greek mythology who was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain. When he takes a break, the boulder rolls back down. And yes, he has to push it back up again.
And for what is all of this for? You begin so that someday you will end and you end so that you can begin anew. Ours is an existence with no sense of purpose, no idea why we must go through with all this, absolutely nothing to look forward to and make us feel that we are doing all this for a reason. No, we just trudge on, dragging ourselves to another day, concerning ourselves with the myriad trivialities we find ourselves facing, then dragging ourselves out. Before you know it, we dragged ourselves in and out of three hundred sixty five days and it's time to change the calendar. Just an endless cycle of beginning and ending. Fortunately, our trivial pursuits give us little bite-size servings of purpose that keeps us from asking, "What's the point of all this?"
From attempts to find the answer to this question began religion. Hindus and Buddhists make it their ultimate goal of finding a way out of their endless cycle, birth and rebirth for Hindus, suffering for Buddhists. Hindus try to attain this with their karma, bhakti or jnanani. I won't discuss in detail because it's so complicated I got lost in the middle of attempting to understand. My apologies to my Asian History professor, who is quite a capable teacher really. Buddhism sounds easier, albeit in a slilghtly deceptive manner. All we have to do is find enlightenment. Yeah, like that's easy.
Meanwhile, Christianity makes it all simpler. We don't get reincarnated, we are taught. But our souls will all be restless unless we find rest in Him. We must become one with God and understand His plan for us and live by it. Simple, reasonable, rational and more humanistic. No wonder Christianity spread all over the world. Or was it the frailes gripping the coattails of Imperialism that spread Christianity? Anyway, the Muslims have it even more simple: Follow the five pillars of Islam and maybe wage a little jihad if you have to and you'll do just fine.
Regardless of what creed you follow, everything just goes around and around. The triumphs and achievements of humanity with the follies and perversions it proliferates. The unspeakable beauty and order found in nature and its cataclysmic wrath that claims the lives of ordinary mortals minding their own business. War and peace, life and death, prosperity and poverty, joy and sorrow, and love.
Well, love is something of a special case. It doesn't really alternate with its antithesis of hate the same way with the above, as it does not necessarily follow that where there is no love there is hate. Nonetheless, it is not devoid of a cyclical nature.
Consider, you find love for the first time. Everything is great. Birds sing in the trees. Sunshine illuminates your whole world. Chocolate raindrops fall from the sky. Then it ends. You are plunged in a depression worse than anyhting inflicted by subprime mortgage and speculative capital run amok. Eventually, after splurging or consuming large amounts of alcoholic beverages or whatever is necessary to cheer you up, you get over it and move on. But suddenly one day, it all starts again. The sun pulls its shutters back, the birds go back to their places and a chocolate rain cloud is hastily dispatched to your location. And just as suddenly, it ends.
An endless cycle of beginning and end. That's what this all is. We wake up everyday not because we really want to but because there's just nothing damn better to do. But maybe, just maybe, if we can set aside some time, despite being completely immersed in this sorry excuse for a life that we are in, to looking for something, or even someone, with the potential to make this pathetic existence bearable, then it's almost as if we already found a way to actually make this pathetic existence bearable, even if we just hope.