Wilhelmina S. Orozco
The music world has a lot of songs about money. Liza Minelli sang "Money, money makes the world go round," in Cabaret. Shirley Maclaine did her own with "Hey big spender, spend a little sum with me," in Sweet Charity. Meanwhile, here in our country, we don't hear much about money songs but rather lament about being poor. I recall a pop musician singing "Bakit ba ganyan ang buhay ng tao, mayrong mayaman, may api sa mundo..." Or listen to that Cebuano song, Usahay, with the lyrics saying about how a man or a woman is not worthy of the love of an other. Is this because the Filipino people still do not favor talking about money directly in songs? In reverse, Madonna justifies her wanting wealth with that song "I'm a material girl."
Anyway, sometime about five years ago, our women's organization lost our savings in a bank after a turn-over. The bank was taken over by a bigger bank. And so, the balance of our checking account (which means it did not earn interest at all no matter how long it stayed in the passbook) dipped below P10,000, about P7,500.00 It was wiped out completely. Upon learning this, I appealed to the mangement and wrote them to reverse the act as we are a non-profit non-stock organization, but until now I have not heard from them. It was a case where they would inform us but the postman would not deliver the letter to our place, or some wise individuals would get hold of the letter and not inform us about it at all. Or the letter was sent to my co-signatory, I really have not fathomed the reason. But closing an account is a very grave move and banks ought to do all means to contact the depositor.
By the way, the Central Bank closed the Banco Filipino and until now I still am waiting for the notice when I will be able to get the funds.
So many other accounts have been lost in this manner, the balance getting below the minimum. Every month the banks would deduct and deduct until the account becomes zero.
Why is it this way? Money is a solid thing which can be used by the bank to purchase or negotiate a deal that could earn it profits. The depositor gives it to them for safekeeping but instead it gets dissipated, as if it were just a thing that ought to be discarded; dismissing the fact that this was hard-earned money of our kababayan. How much is going to banks when they close accounts? I have myself lost more than P800 pesos covering bank charges in another account.
I also have heard of friends who look for a bank with a minimal deposit but eventually could not open an account because even P500 is very difficult to maintain during these hard times when the basic commodities and services are going up.
We have oil wells but the prices of oil keep going up and a little down, and then up and up again. We have greenfields yet we import rice. We have a huge reservoir of labor, manual, professional, but where are the jobs available for them: abroad. Many would not want to take the opportunity because it would separate them from their loved ones. Others would travel and them return and then eventually leave the country because it would really be a great loss of opportunity if they would not take advantage of it while they are still young. "Anyway, the Philippines is always there for us to retire in. We need to earn so we can buy a good house and lot, have a lot of money till our breathing day," seems to be the raison d'etre for that exodus to other lands, among other reasons.
As we glean the richest of the rich in our country, we know that they also worked hard to earn that rainbow space in the sky.
Now if they are already very, very rich, so much so that you could imagine their having every square millimeter of their skin being worth patsy millions of pesos, and their children, their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren (according to a bank employee) needing no longer lift a finger to work as their future is secured after inheritance, why couldn't they waive those atrocious bank charges when the balance dips? After all, these are just paper transactions; the money is not being withdrawn, and the depositor leaves it there for safekeeping.
So please my dear Kababayan, let me understand why the Central Bank does not make a peep over this. For whom is it working?
Let us now get into depths of all the moves that make our economy awry, skewed against the poor.
"If you make fun of poor people, you insult the God who made them. You will be punished if you take pleasure in someone's misfortune." Prov 17:5
"If you oppress poor people, you insult the God who made them; but kindness shown to the poor is an act of worship." Prov 14:31
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
PERENNIAL FLOODING: SYMBOL OF LACK OF POLITICAL WILL
Wilhelmina S. Orozco
Why are our problems as a people highly repetitive? Are we advancing or regressing? The floods are perennially with us. Yet how many civil engineers do we graduate every year? Why aren’t all the civil engineers getting together to help solve the problems of flooding in the National Capital Region?
Talayan, Tatalon are inundated by floods every time it rains. Before in the 60’s it would take usually 5 days for the floods to come. But now it is only two to three hours. Why so? Number one, the children and adults have not been taught to dispose of foils, styrofoams and glasses properly. Around school grounds one will find lots of vendors using plastic bags for ice candy and other snack foods. What do the school children and the parents do after finishing off the foodstuffs? Most of them just throw the plastic by the sidewalk. Where is the MetroAide to clean up the place? None. They are all at the main streets, sweeping, trying to give the foreign visitors a “clean” view of the cities. Are there wastecans along the streets? None. “Ninanakaw Ma’am, eh” that’s the reason given by local officials. So if they are stolen what should be done? Tie up the waste cans on posts, or build concrete rectangular bins and place huge plastic bags in them.
Look at Araneta Avenue and you will find that the sides of the streets have blocked waters causing that swishing scenery everytime vehicles pass by. What is the cause of this? Poor engineering. The public works contractor did not provide for a large canal to handle the rain waters. The level of the sidewalks are the same as the middle grounds. So when the rains fall they just stay on the road and clog up the sides making it very difficult for the passersby and commuters to negotiate their way to their destination or even to get into a jeepney. What is the solution here? Ban those public works contractors that shortchange the public.
Now what should we do with floods? If you will look at the creek at Tatalon from a bird’s eye viewpoint, you will note that it has the tendency to wind its way. The waters start to get voluminous when it reaches the bridge along E. Rodriguez and seems to get stuck before the UE Ramon Magsaysay Hospital. On its way to Mandaluyong, the waters turn very slowly. Hence the problem here is that the siltation in the creek causes the waters to go slot on its way to the Pasig Riverl Instead it gets stuck in the nearby barangay causing havoc on lives and property.
So what is the solution here? Creation of dikes and digging down the creek to make it deeper. Simple? Very simple. Why couldn’t they do these? Will. Political Will. POLITICAL WILL.
Everyday I see those MMDA platforms on the creek along E. Rodriguez. But do they move at all? I never saw anything being dumped there save some small pieces of waste papers at one time or another. Yet. It stays there 24 hours a day. The workers move oh so slowly, like zombies. And they are numerous all the time, yet their work hardly moves. The waters still rise and rise after two hours of rainfall. What is the solution here? Remove flood control projects from the government. Give it to non-government organizations whose members have the hearts and minds to solve the problem of flooding.
Again, Political Will. What animal is that, some would ask cynically. Yet that is the lifeblood of change in any society. Without the need to really make changes, our life will forever be a ground for lazy, uncommitted and corrupt government officials together with their contractors out to make a fast buck on any government project. Forget change. Forget patriotistm. Let us all migrate. Is that the solution they want us to make so that they can lord it over here for centuries.
But if the civil engineers in our country would really bond together, affirm their love of country and draw up a plan which could be whipped up from the Dutch lessons on solving their floods, I am sure, we would get somewhere.
Painting: Winter, or the Flood, 1660-64
by Nicolas Poussin
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
ON LAND USE FOR ALL
By Wilhelmina S. Orozco
Is it development when huge tracts of land which should have been sources of food crops are converted into golf courses? Is it development when no alternative jobs await farmers and farmworkers and the land they till for decades of years are removed from their control?
Unfortunately the conversion of agricultural lands has not stopped despite all the reasons that have been put up by environmentalists and the social scientists who favor agricultural development over industrialization. The worst case I have seen is that of the conversion of rolling agricultural lands into a golf course up there in Forest Hills Antipolo, Rizal.
Passing eras
Sad, sad, sad. I could not ease the heaviness on my chest as I saw hectares and hectares of land which probably a year or two before used to be immersed in water to make the rice seedlings grow during this rainy season. Then I remembered the roads of Bulacan way back in the 60’s with its sidewalks full of vendors selling green ripe mangoes along roads from Marilao up to the last town going to Nueva Ecija from where my Mother hailed. Now the vendors are gone and must have shifted their businesses in the towns and cities to sell – of all things - cigarettes and candies instead.
An era is passing by or must have passed by already. New communities will be rising from those lands now, to be peopled by professionals, traders, students, and even the families of overseas Filipino workers as long as they can afford to give the deposit, the mortgage fees, or even pay cash for the house and lot that will be built.
The eras of women and men bowed down planting rice from early morn to late lunch, the spouse or the grandmothers with their heads wrapped in bandannas and carrying a basket of lunches for the planters and traipsing through the pilapil; the carabao leading the farmer as he plows the soil, nipa huts with coconut and fruit trees beside them – all these scenes and more farm scenes as those that the painter Fernando Amorsolo had painted ideally would soon be deleted in our landscape and worst of all, in our memories. Only the painter’s works would be the living legacy of what those lands used to be.
Our grandchildren and great grandchildren would no longer experience that grand feeling of making their feet touch the earth and grass, riding a carabao, climbing trees to pick fruits or even to get the eggs of birds or chickens nestled up the branches. They would have no memories of how our forefathers had used the land to make it bear fruits and grow crops.
Why, why should development be this way?
Endangered species
Yesterday, as the rains started to fall, I saw three cows seemingly in a hurry to walk up the concrete road of that broad expanse of green landscape which could have been a riceland before. Then they huddled and stood together like a team of soldiers feeling the warmth between their bodies and unmoving while the rains trickled down their bodies. What was in their mind? Could it be a feeling of anxiety over the narrowing of grasslands that they could graze on? Could it be fears of being slaughtered once their owner could no longer feed them in the long run? Could it be a feeling of hopelessness over the lack of appreciation of their abilities to provide milk?
I learned, at a seminar conducted by Ramon Mendoza, of an American product made up of colostrum which is extracted from cows. This has anti-cancer properties, can prevent hairloss, energize and rejuvenate and strengthen the cells of the body by 20 years.
If our country would build ranches in all the provinces with rolling hills and mountains, and then fill them with cows and carabaos, then we could have a thriving cattle industry capable of providing colostrum for this company to package into capsules. We would also have an unlimited supply of milk.
Thus, I felt a pang of loss over the plight of these endangered species, the cows. But as I gazed around, the trucks and cranes digging the soil, a felled huge tree with its roots rising up, and houses dotting the landscape here and there, I knew that all their fears are real. The cows – our carabaos are already endangered species a long time ago with the destruction of agricultural lands -- would soon be made redundant, inutile, and invisible as the race for sheltering the people who have overcrowded in MetroManila in search of jobs goes on.
What happens when the entire country becomes all concrete jungle and then just to view birds, animals, butterflies and plants we all have to go to a zoo or a park as they contain these flora and fauna which no longer exist naturally around us?
The more affluent could always pack up and go to other lands where care of their environment is paramount. But, we the “hoi polloi” who have to scratch the grounds to eat daily, could only sigh and pray that our country could still be an oasis of natural beauty.
Where to start
Should we view life without land as a natural phenomenon? What is life without the land? I think we know the answers to these already. The lack of care for the land brought about landslides in Leyte, Bicol and Antipolo. Fruits and vegetables which could be grown just in our backyard before are now very rarely raised and are hardly sold in the market except for those grown in Benguet and then have to be transported to metroManila, hundreds of kilometers away. Yet we know their nutritional values and their importance for our bodies to be healthy which then makes it imperative for them to be naturally grown and made abundant.
Starting young
I believe that love of the environment should start at home and in the nurseries as the children are learning how to read and write. The latter are at that stage of being most receptive in learning new things which they could carry with them in their adulthood later on.
Actually, there is still time to encourage the children and the youth to enjoy the natural scenery in reality instead of those on the television screens. Their senses will be made sharper as they touch, smell and feel the plants and animals.
But I see right now the high school students as the forgotten or ignored sector of our society. They are the last in the list of lacking any feeling for the environment– they throw the wrappers of their chewing gum, the plastic bags of their buko juice, the cigarette stubs, the barbecue sticks and the foil wrappers of chicheria just about anywhere. They smoke in great abandon polluting the air. They could care less if they bother other people inside the internet shops with their loud voices as they play violent computer games. Saddest of all they seem not knowledgeable at all nor do they care enough about what social issues are currently being discussed and analyzed. But once they face the computer to play games, they suddenly become very much alive. Isn’t there a distortion of educational priorities at this time?
Hence the Department of Education should mandate all teachers and principals to daily remind students to respect the environment and do something to make it stick in the minds whether they are in school or in the outside world. It should provide filmshowings and VCDs depicting the beauty and value of Mother Nature, and how the young and adults too could be active participants in protecting, preserving and conserving our natural resources.
Also, shelter communities should be turned into small villages with only a hundred or so families and still surrounded by greenery that produce food crops. This type of development I think is being implemented somewhere in the south of Manila. We must insist on this to prevent that time from coming when every fruit and vegetable that we eat have to be imported from other countries as what is happening now to our rice, our staple food. Hence, those local governments approving land use must be aware of the consequences of environmental decisions that could make the land barren.
I hope that my impressions would touch the nerve of all environmentalists and policy makers in our society. I also pray that think tank groups would be created to dig into the issues that I have raised and provide ultimate solutions on how we could raise generations of lovers of lands and Mother Nature.
Lastly, the President has to set the prime example of being an environmentalist by quitting to smoke. That actually can be very easy: he should always carry an orange fruit to munch whenever he feels that pang to puff a stick. Or he could imagine nicotine eating up every cell in his lungs its sticking like black tar on every globule of his lungs which later on would make him breathe with great difficulty. Lastly we must ask him if he knows how to meditate as this is a good tool for having great self control against all forms of addiction not just smoking.
Ancestral lands for everyone
Something connects me to the land as if my soul is deeply infused in it. I now recall Macliing, the Igorot leader against the construction of the Chico Hydroelectric Project in Northern Luzon, and his statement: “Why talk of owning the land when it is the other way around: the land owns us?” He said this during a bodong in his community, Bugnay, Kalinga in 1970 before he was murdered by the military. He emphasized the idea that the land is for everyone and not for a few thus expressing the Igorot belief of the communal ownership of all natural resources. (Note: The bodong is a peacepact meeting among all the elders of affected tribes and the people together with their guests from the lowlands. )
It is an ancient belief that has been handed down for generations in their tribal societies. It is the same belief of the Tingguians of Abra who resisted the setting up of the Cellophil Resources company in their ancestral lands which were supposed to be planted with cellophil trees. Cellophil is that element used by factories for making paper.
All over the world, tribal communities hold the same idea. It is the same belief that the Indians in North America held before they were conquered by the colonialists and which was why they resisted the incursions into their lands vehemently.
Gandhi echoed the same belief when he said, “The earth’s resources are for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.” In other words, Land is for everyone. It does not need titling by anyone as they who have needs should be free to use it.
Holding Up the Land, painting by emma orozco 2010 now hanging at the office Ms. Rosalinda Pineda-Ofreneo, Ph.D., Dean of the UP College of Social Work and Community Development
Monday, June 13, 2011
RETHINKING URBAN LANDSCAPE
During the time of the Imeldific czarina and the dictator Marcos, the prevailing philosophy in MetroManila was - the true, the good and the beautiful. It was actually a reaction to the radical and Maoist artistic practice of depicting in huge streamers and building graffiti Marcos as a puppet of the US, the US as an imperialist, and the need for serving the people en masse -- mainly the working class.
Being in charge of a huge budget, Imelda built many edifices which look too grandiose and out of sync with the size of the Filipino people. You would not find any tinge of being Filipino in the external architecture of the Cultural Center (which looks like a huge toilet bowl according to one critic), and the Philippine Heart Center for Asia, for examples. They exhibit a non-Filipino design which is sad because the money used was that of the Filipino people. When you enter the buildings, you feel dwarfed by the size, as if you were inside the mouth of a huge box of concrete.
How come our Asian neighbors are able to come up with distinct building designs that could be labeled as theirs, whereas we, who have many college-educated architects hardly create or discover to create an architectural design that would be truly Filipino? Folks, kindly mention to me any building you would consider Filipino now.
What is a truly Filipino building to me must incorporate elements that can be found in the nipa hut like the triangular roofing, the capiz-shell windows, the texture of mats, etcetera. Unfortunately, such are usually reserved for application on homes instead of buildings that can be found along major commercial streets. Maybe students and faculty of architecture, aside from pouring over the need for green housing projects, could start inventing ways of designing buildings that truly represent the identity of the Filipino people's environment.
But right now, I am also uneasy about what is happening to the buildings around the major thoroughfares of MetroManila.
MetroManila is suffering from extreme destruction of the beauty of architecture of its buildings due to the unbridled placement of advertising billboards some of which even dwarf them.
At Espana you see a proliferation of small advertising billboards of small businesses which really cover the whole facade of the building. It is as if the office which put up the advertisement is the only one being housed in it. Ad billboards placed on the upper section of the building, just above the door height, are by restaurants, 2nd hand bookstores, printing and computer shops, etcetera. So while cruising along Espana, you will no longer be able to distinguish in what part you are since the billboards just cover every inch of what would give recognition to a street corner or so. Also buildings showing Spanish influence in their designs are slowly being destroyed instead of preserved.
Along EDSA- this highway is the worst- you can hardly see the beauty of buildings due to the building-size outdoor billboards. Everywhere you gaze, there is a huge billboard; even when you look out the car window while passing through a bridge. Your eyes are not allowed to rest at all from the many sights of commercial ads urging you to get lured, to touch, to buy a product. Building-size ads of youthful human models abound, sometimes in elegant clothes, other times in skimpy attire -- a brief or a bikini which are truly irrelevant scenes when one is going to the office, with some faces smiling, pouting, morose and jolly.
Sexy ads
Can you refocus your mind to getting into bed again in bikini while you are riding the train going to Makati? Instead of making you feel refreshed and in great vigor to face the pressures of business and employment, the ads entice you to go back to bed.
(This is why probably you see a lot of couples now moving about in different poses: the girl putting her head on the shoulder of the man beside her while seated inside the train, the jeep, the bus, and even while standing on a street corner. They project the Filipino people as to-hell-do-I-care individuals ready for bed 24 hours a day. The girls' propensity to act in this manner project themselves as insecure as if they must do so in order to insure that the eyes of the men are on them and not wandering around. One girl wearing short shorts had her hand in between the legs of her boyfriend inside the jeepney. (What next move would come to your mind given that scene but foreplay.) then the ads targetting women consumers make the women feel insecure about their (our) own bodies -- as they focus on youth through cosmetic surgery, fashion instead of practical clothes for any kind of weather, junk instead of healthy foods; living artificially instead of communing with nature and many more.
Well this type of consumerist thinking is also reenforced by noontime shows -- by classification should be for adults only as they are take offs from nightclubs and bar shows -- which present thighs galore in short shorts,and the dancers pumping up and down. When the camera only focuses on the dancers from waist up and they are doing this movement, what image do you get but one who is having a good time in bed with another. The movements imitate the sex act altogether. Now I really pity those TV hosts who started out as wholesome figures but now have to follow the trend displaying their thighs in order to stay in the highly competitive industry for recognition -- not for their talents to speak and deliver a sensible spiel but for their youthful physical attributes.)
I think that the advertising industry has created individualistic (selfish or self-centered?) and hedonistic mindsets of monstrous proportions so that the unmindful and uncritical youth are now ready to surrender to every message and imitate what it churns out to be destructive of certain fundamental values we hold dear. The industry has mistaken freedom of expression with freedom to corrupt the minds of the youth and to limit their sights to false stardom and recognition based on false representations and values. It has also focused on using sex as the underlying come-on tactic to make the consumers buy or patronize a product or service.
Outdated billboards
Take note also of bus stops. The roofs of the waiting sheds there are dwarfed again by billboards -- some lit up for nighttime viewing. You read about this and that movie opening at such and such a date. Most of the time, the date is already months old and yet the billboard is still there. So your tendency is to calculate how old the movie is.
When you go through the sidestreets, you will notice here the political ads placed on houses dating back to 2004, 2007 and 2010. You see faded pictures of candidates running for this and that position. Then a barangay office here in Quezon City is full of tarpaulins of the winners congratulating the people for Christmas, for graduation, for fiesta etcetera, which I suspect is their preparation for the next elections. They want the people to always remember their faces and their names through the tarpaulins, never mind if the building architecture cannot be viewed anymore. (Yet the barangay does not display on billboard the kinds of projects it will fund for the years of administration.)
Manila billboards
What really makes me angry is the way Manila has handled advertisements near the City Hall and at Plaza Lawton. The nationalistic meaning of the sculpture of Bonifacio and the Katipuneros holding tabak is ridiculeled by a liquor advert. It seems as if Bonifacio and his society drank that liquor in order to feel love of country. Quite sickening, isn't it?
Then, approaching Lawton from Pasay, where the Intramuros, the American period Philippine Post Office and the Metropolitan Theatre buildings are situated, we are barraged with moving LED ads on top of the waiting shed. Instead of our feeling awe and proud of the beauty of Lawton with all the historical buildings around, we are made to feel in a hurry to make a profit, to earn so we can buy the products advertised there. Whoever allowed that LED to be placed there has just made us devalue our national identity. Why because those buildings reflect our past as a people.
I learned from Lucille Tenazas, a designer from Parsons The New School for Design in New York who delivered a talk at the Ayala Museum that billboards are not allowed to hang up the buildings there. And so to circumvent that she designed the letters P-a-r-s-o-n-s as individually sculpted and hanged them by the top of the doorway of the building lying down. She could not be faulted with having violated the city regulation since the letters were not covering the building at all. Today, it has become a kind of landmark design for New Yorkers because it was an aesthetic reaction to a government policy.
To maintain the historical beauty and elegance of MetroManila which I subscribe to, I would opt for the creation of an aesthetic task force composed of noted architects, painters, visual artists, landscape artists, and urban and rural planners from the academe and practicing fields.
Let us not allow her to remain in this condition -- a place where advertising instead of aesthetics rules.
I would also suggest that short shorts attire be banned at universities and colleges, and along the major streets of MetroManila. Why so? Short shorts are for loafing around. They attract the roving eyes of young male students instead of making them focus on their studies. Girls and women who wear them show their lack of sensitivity to the cultural values of people, especially of those coming from the provinces whose idea of womanhood includes covered thighs, among others.
Advertisers must stop treating the people as non-thinking buyers and consumers.
Sure, capitalism which uses advertising propels business and encourages the people to work, and earn a profit from their efforts. But the system has to be directed to move along lines that bring out the best and noble traits of the people putting value on love of country, as well as love of fellow human beings especially the disadvantaged and the marginalized.
Being in charge of a huge budget, Imelda built many edifices which look too grandiose and out of sync with the size of the Filipino people. You would not find any tinge of being Filipino in the external architecture of the Cultural Center (which looks like a huge toilet bowl according to one critic), and the Philippine Heart Center for Asia, for examples. They exhibit a non-Filipino design which is sad because the money used was that of the Filipino people. When you enter the buildings, you feel dwarfed by the size, as if you were inside the mouth of a huge box of concrete.
How come our Asian neighbors are able to come up with distinct building designs that could be labeled as theirs, whereas we, who have many college-educated architects hardly create or discover to create an architectural design that would be truly Filipino? Folks, kindly mention to me any building you would consider Filipino now.
What is a truly Filipino building to me must incorporate elements that can be found in the nipa hut like the triangular roofing, the capiz-shell windows, the texture of mats, etcetera. Unfortunately, such are usually reserved for application on homes instead of buildings that can be found along major commercial streets. Maybe students and faculty of architecture, aside from pouring over the need for green housing projects, could start inventing ways of designing buildings that truly represent the identity of the Filipino people's environment.
But right now, I am also uneasy about what is happening to the buildings around the major thoroughfares of MetroManila.
MetroManila is suffering from extreme destruction of the beauty of architecture of its buildings due to the unbridled placement of advertising billboards some of which even dwarf them.
At Espana you see a proliferation of small advertising billboards of small businesses which really cover the whole facade of the building. It is as if the office which put up the advertisement is the only one being housed in it. Ad billboards placed on the upper section of the building, just above the door height, are by restaurants, 2nd hand bookstores, printing and computer shops, etcetera. So while cruising along Espana, you will no longer be able to distinguish in what part you are since the billboards just cover every inch of what would give recognition to a street corner or so. Also buildings showing Spanish influence in their designs are slowly being destroyed instead of preserved.
Along EDSA- this highway is the worst- you can hardly see the beauty of buildings due to the building-size outdoor billboards. Everywhere you gaze, there is a huge billboard; even when you look out the car window while passing through a bridge. Your eyes are not allowed to rest at all from the many sights of commercial ads urging you to get lured, to touch, to buy a product. Building-size ads of youthful human models abound, sometimes in elegant clothes, other times in skimpy attire -- a brief or a bikini which are truly irrelevant scenes when one is going to the office, with some faces smiling, pouting, morose and jolly.
Sexy ads
Can you refocus your mind to getting into bed again in bikini while you are riding the train going to Makati? Instead of making you feel refreshed and in great vigor to face the pressures of business and employment, the ads entice you to go back to bed.
(This is why probably you see a lot of couples now moving about in different poses: the girl putting her head on the shoulder of the man beside her while seated inside the train, the jeep, the bus, and even while standing on a street corner. They project the Filipino people as to-hell-do-I-care individuals ready for bed 24 hours a day. The girls' propensity to act in this manner project themselves as insecure as if they must do so in order to insure that the eyes of the men are on them and not wandering around. One girl wearing short shorts had her hand in between the legs of her boyfriend inside the jeepney. (What next move would come to your mind given that scene but foreplay.) then the ads targetting women consumers make the women feel insecure about their (our) own bodies -- as they focus on youth through cosmetic surgery, fashion instead of practical clothes for any kind of weather, junk instead of healthy foods; living artificially instead of communing with nature and many more.
Well this type of consumerist thinking is also reenforced by noontime shows -- by classification should be for adults only as they are take offs from nightclubs and bar shows -- which present thighs galore in short shorts,and the dancers pumping up and down. When the camera only focuses on the dancers from waist up and they are doing this movement, what image do you get but one who is having a good time in bed with another. The movements imitate the sex act altogether. Now I really pity those TV hosts who started out as wholesome figures but now have to follow the trend displaying their thighs in order to stay in the highly competitive industry for recognition -- not for their talents to speak and deliver a sensible spiel but for their youthful physical attributes.)
I think that the advertising industry has created individualistic (selfish or self-centered?) and hedonistic mindsets of monstrous proportions so that the unmindful and uncritical youth are now ready to surrender to every message and imitate what it churns out to be destructive of certain fundamental values we hold dear. The industry has mistaken freedom of expression with freedom to corrupt the minds of the youth and to limit their sights to false stardom and recognition based on false representations and values. It has also focused on using sex as the underlying come-on tactic to make the consumers buy or patronize a product or service.
Outdated billboards
Take note also of bus stops. The roofs of the waiting sheds there are dwarfed again by billboards -- some lit up for nighttime viewing. You read about this and that movie opening at such and such a date. Most of the time, the date is already months old and yet the billboard is still there. So your tendency is to calculate how old the movie is.
When you go through the sidestreets, you will notice here the political ads placed on houses dating back to 2004, 2007 and 2010. You see faded pictures of candidates running for this and that position. Then a barangay office here in Quezon City is full of tarpaulins of the winners congratulating the people for Christmas, for graduation, for fiesta etcetera, which I suspect is their preparation for the next elections. They want the people to always remember their faces and their names through the tarpaulins, never mind if the building architecture cannot be viewed anymore. (Yet the barangay does not display on billboard the kinds of projects it will fund for the years of administration.)
Manila billboards
What really makes me angry is the way Manila has handled advertisements near the City Hall and at Plaza Lawton. The nationalistic meaning of the sculpture of Bonifacio and the Katipuneros holding tabak is ridiculeled by a liquor advert. It seems as if Bonifacio and his society drank that liquor in order to feel love of country. Quite sickening, isn't it?
Then, approaching Lawton from Pasay, where the Intramuros, the American period Philippine Post Office and the Metropolitan Theatre buildings are situated, we are barraged with moving LED ads on top of the waiting shed. Instead of our feeling awe and proud of the beauty of Lawton with all the historical buildings around, we are made to feel in a hurry to make a profit, to earn so we can buy the products advertised there. Whoever allowed that LED to be placed there has just made us devalue our national identity. Why because those buildings reflect our past as a people.
I learned from Lucille Tenazas, a designer from Parsons The New School for Design in New York who delivered a talk at the Ayala Museum that billboards are not allowed to hang up the buildings there. And so to circumvent that she designed the letters P-a-r-s-o-n-s as individually sculpted and hanged them by the top of the doorway of the building lying down. She could not be faulted with having violated the city regulation since the letters were not covering the building at all. Today, it has become a kind of landmark design for New Yorkers because it was an aesthetic reaction to a government policy.
To maintain the historical beauty and elegance of MetroManila which I subscribe to, I would opt for the creation of an aesthetic task force composed of noted architects, painters, visual artists, landscape artists, and urban and rural planners from the academe and practicing fields.
Let us not allow her to remain in this condition -- a place where advertising instead of aesthetics rules.
I would also suggest that short shorts attire be banned at universities and colleges, and along the major streets of MetroManila. Why so? Short shorts are for loafing around. They attract the roving eyes of young male students instead of making them focus on their studies. Girls and women who wear them show their lack of sensitivity to the cultural values of people, especially of those coming from the provinces whose idea of womanhood includes covered thighs, among others.
Advertisers must stop treating the people as non-thinking buyers and consumers.
Sure, capitalism which uses advertising propels business and encourages the people to work, and earn a profit from their efforts. But the system has to be directed to move along lines that bring out the best and noble traits of the people putting value on love of country, as well as love of fellow human beings especially the disadvantaged and the marginalized.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
ON NOT BURYING HISTORICAL MEMORIES
WHAT IS BLACKMAIL?
Have the Filipino people ever succumbed to blackmail?
The great problem now of the people is how to face those who are blackmailing us. You give this and we will give this to you. You do this and you will earn this much. You follow me and you will live in heaven.
So, after so many years of being a captive of an administration, which, in order to exist “legally” had to blackmail the State protectors, number one, and legislators, number two, who would render her election legitimate, our folks now have imbibed or are being made to imbibe a value system that puts pragmatism over all principles of decency, true democracy, and respect for human rights.
This is now one big problem for us: how to erase that value system and allow us as a people to exist with dignity.
Why should we face this problem now? We are at a crossroads of having to choose our own pride and dignity over a blackmail system which would render us inutile, and real “drugged mules” in history. Why should we say “drugged?” Because it is quite heady to know that we could earn trillions just by signing that deed to declare a dictator that we deposed a hero right in our own shores.
Should we erase our world reputation as the people who started it all: that revolution to revert back to democracy, boot out a dictator bloodlessly, install a woman president who was not a politician but who possessed all the virtues of helping to regain our pride as a people to the world, and restore legally that free expression of our rights, whether through the press, radio, tv, film or assembly, among other rights? How short our memory is if we do.
Is history created by a people or a few individuals? Who moves a society to act in totality, to alter systems and to restore first of all what is called humanity? No, majority of our people have braved living in foreign shores to help their families earn a more than a decent lifestyle here. They ventured out to foreign lands, strange cultures and sometimes overly arrogant and aristocratic superiors just to work and earn funds that they could remit back home to their loved ones.They were welcomed because they came from a country that taught the world how people power can be a tool for acquiring dignity and respect in society.
So for some quarters to blackmail those who have been left behind to sign that “death sentence” to declare a dictator a hero is not only erasing our national image as noble advocates for free expression, which by the way has become a model for imitation in all other parts of the world, albeit not successful in some, like Germany, Russia, Poland, Hong Kong, and now, in African and the Middle East countries. Rather, it is creating cretins of us all, unable to withstand financial blackmail, unworthy of all the sacrifices of all our martyrs for our country to earn its equal status in the world as a democratic nation during the anti-colonial periods and beyond.
Worse of worsts, is it not a strange suggestion to declare a dictator a hero in even one square inch of soil in our country? A dictator is a dictator is a dictator just like Hitler, Ghaddafy, that Yemen president and that fake president we had for 9 years. They are in their posts in order to kill all protests against their holding on to power. They will use all means – even bomb out of existence their own people, kill their political opponents, journalists and media practitioners who write and speak against them, in order to be installed, as well as to maintain themselves in power for life. And that happened right here in our country which we pray and hope would not happen again.
Not a square inch
Why should we not give even a square of an inch or millimeter to declare a dictator a hero, military and otherwise? Why, because every square millimeter of soil in our country should be treated as sacred. Our true heroes and heroines shed their blood, sacrificed their whole lives here on this soil in order to make our country shine equally among all nations. They organized and led movements to show to all colonizers and the world that we are a people that have principles and ideals, that the brown race is equal to all races in the world. Hence, we are the first country in Asia to be freed from colonial rule, and the first in the world to successfully launch a people power movement.
Now what are the consequences of giving military honors to a dictator? First of all, was he a soldier at all? Don’t we know that all his medals were fake? And his being a commander-in-chief then was forced upon on the people? That he did not earn his presidency (which carries with it that title of being a commander-in-chief) through legitimate means? So why give honors at all? What would be the basis for that? Honors are given by a people and for us to have been subjected to dictatorial rule, then to make us honor that dictator makes us the laughing stock of everyone.
Spitting on our people power image
By having a part of our country be declared as a “heroic” place for the burial of dictator is to teach our children that they could follow his life – rule as a dictator, kill as many people as you want, and then ask to be declared a hero. It means writing and re-writing all elementary and high school books to make them carry the message that people power was a queer phenomenon and that now we are spitting on that 1986 image of ours. It also means telling the countries of the world, “Hey Folks, we are back to square one as if 1986 never happened at all. Sorry about that but we need money. Money makes the world go round, you know.” And so, we should return all those accolades that we received from them after we had booted out the dictator, his family and his cohorts.
Those who are pushing for the declaration of a dictator as a hero are advancing a nightmarish future for our children and our children’s children. They are pressuring us to erase all books that have written him as a dictator. They want us to eat what we have vomited. They are labeling all the democratic intellectuals of the land as stupid idiots whose idealism makes them all quixotic, out of their minds because they cannot eat their ideals. They are making a mockery of all the women who supported Cory because the dictator had said, "All women are fit for the bedroom only," during the snap presidential election campaign.
The consequences of that move to make a fake president a hero is to treat all his cohorts who propped him up as heroes also, including those military generals who ordered the shooting of demonstrators, the killing of protesters, etc. The list is endless and it is almost as if 1986 never happened at all.
Flipflopping definitions
Hence, for us to have a decent democratic life, and not a kind of democracy where flipflopping on historical definitions becomes a great pastime, let us strengthen our moral fiber and face all blackmailers together to make them retreat from their posturings as lovers of our country. No they do not love our country but themselves, their plans for rising up the political ladder in this country, to rule and for people to bow down to them. Those are not the leaders that we need in our country.
Let us reflect again and again on what we truly are. We are a people whose spiritual strength is being eroded day in and day out by the kind of occurrences in our country – from a divided south, to environmental degradation of fishkills and landslides, a Church that refuses to see the realities of women’s and couples’ burden of feeding huge families by insisting on its stand against reproductive health and who insist on their forgetting what sex with love means, to an economic system that allows the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer -- that makes the Central Bank a patsy while banks deduct and deduct from and up to the last centavo of the depositors’ savings; a Central Bank that allows pawnshops to rig their charges, as they make pawned renewals a chance to impose service charges again instead of just interests; and so forth and so on. Our financial system is truly a boggling maze of closed and open fists.
Actually, we need nurturing to carry on living so as not to resort to violent means that will render our country a battleground between the haves and the have-nots. We need leaders who have that moral strength to resist the residual effects of a dictatorial rule in this country. We need them to make us remember and not bury our great noble historical memories.
We also need to make our definitions of heroism clearer to the youth so that they would grow up knowing that a hero or heroine is not only someone who would die for the country, but one who knows how to bring the country through a noble path that is corrupt-free and a genuine server of the peoples’ needs.
Lastly, Third World countries like ours could be an easy captive for affluent groups that are out to destroy all the respect for human rights in order to make a profit and gain political power. Hence, let us ask the United Nations to put up a covenant among all nations on how to define heroism and how to honor heroes and heroines. By having a UN covenant, all countries would be on alert against allowing neo-Nazis and pro-dictators to exist, rise up and gain power again.
A lifetime is not really enough to strengthen true democracy as a way of life. Hence the struggle remains and we need to face it squarely and strongly, morally speaking.
Have the Filipino people ever succumbed to blackmail?
The great problem now of the people is how to face those who are blackmailing us. You give this and we will give this to you. You do this and you will earn this much. You follow me and you will live in heaven.
So, after so many years of being a captive of an administration, which, in order to exist “legally” had to blackmail the State protectors, number one, and legislators, number two, who would render her election legitimate, our folks now have imbibed or are being made to imbibe a value system that puts pragmatism over all principles of decency, true democracy, and respect for human rights.
This is now one big problem for us: how to erase that value system and allow us as a people to exist with dignity.
Why should we face this problem now? We are at a crossroads of having to choose our own pride and dignity over a blackmail system which would render us inutile, and real “drugged mules” in history. Why should we say “drugged?” Because it is quite heady to know that we could earn trillions just by signing that deed to declare a dictator that we deposed a hero right in our own shores.
Should we erase our world reputation as the people who started it all: that revolution to revert back to democracy, boot out a dictator bloodlessly, install a woman president who was not a politician but who possessed all the virtues of helping to regain our pride as a people to the world, and restore legally that free expression of our rights, whether through the press, radio, tv, film or assembly, among other rights? How short our memory is if we do.
Is history created by a people or a few individuals? Who moves a society to act in totality, to alter systems and to restore first of all what is called humanity? No, majority of our people have braved living in foreign shores to help their families earn a more than a decent lifestyle here. They ventured out to foreign lands, strange cultures and sometimes overly arrogant and aristocratic superiors just to work and earn funds that they could remit back home to their loved ones.They were welcomed because they came from a country that taught the world how people power can be a tool for acquiring dignity and respect in society.
So for some quarters to blackmail those who have been left behind to sign that “death sentence” to declare a dictator a hero is not only erasing our national image as noble advocates for free expression, which by the way has become a model for imitation in all other parts of the world, albeit not successful in some, like Germany, Russia, Poland, Hong Kong, and now, in African and the Middle East countries. Rather, it is creating cretins of us all, unable to withstand financial blackmail, unworthy of all the sacrifices of all our martyrs for our country to earn its equal status in the world as a democratic nation during the anti-colonial periods and beyond.
Worse of worsts, is it not a strange suggestion to declare a dictator a hero in even one square inch of soil in our country? A dictator is a dictator is a dictator just like Hitler, Ghaddafy, that Yemen president and that fake president we had for 9 years. They are in their posts in order to kill all protests against their holding on to power. They will use all means – even bomb out of existence their own people, kill their political opponents, journalists and media practitioners who write and speak against them, in order to be installed, as well as to maintain themselves in power for life. And that happened right here in our country which we pray and hope would not happen again.
Not a square inch
Why should we not give even a square of an inch or millimeter to declare a dictator a hero, military and otherwise? Why, because every square millimeter of soil in our country should be treated as sacred. Our true heroes and heroines shed their blood, sacrificed their whole lives here on this soil in order to make our country shine equally among all nations. They organized and led movements to show to all colonizers and the world that we are a people that have principles and ideals, that the brown race is equal to all races in the world. Hence, we are the first country in Asia to be freed from colonial rule, and the first in the world to successfully launch a people power movement.
Now what are the consequences of giving military honors to a dictator? First of all, was he a soldier at all? Don’t we know that all his medals were fake? And his being a commander-in-chief then was forced upon on the people? That he did not earn his presidency (which carries with it that title of being a commander-in-chief) through legitimate means? So why give honors at all? What would be the basis for that? Honors are given by a people and for us to have been subjected to dictatorial rule, then to make us honor that dictator makes us the laughing stock of everyone.
Spitting on our people power image
By having a part of our country be declared as a “heroic” place for the burial of dictator is to teach our children that they could follow his life – rule as a dictator, kill as many people as you want, and then ask to be declared a hero. It means writing and re-writing all elementary and high school books to make them carry the message that people power was a queer phenomenon and that now we are spitting on that 1986 image of ours. It also means telling the countries of the world, “Hey Folks, we are back to square one as if 1986 never happened at all. Sorry about that but we need money. Money makes the world go round, you know.” And so, we should return all those accolades that we received from them after we had booted out the dictator, his family and his cohorts.
Those who are pushing for the declaration of a dictator as a hero are advancing a nightmarish future for our children and our children’s children. They are pressuring us to erase all books that have written him as a dictator. They want us to eat what we have vomited. They are labeling all the democratic intellectuals of the land as stupid idiots whose idealism makes them all quixotic, out of their minds because they cannot eat their ideals. They are making a mockery of all the women who supported Cory because the dictator had said, "All women are fit for the bedroom only," during the snap presidential election campaign.
The consequences of that move to make a fake president a hero is to treat all his cohorts who propped him up as heroes also, including those military generals who ordered the shooting of demonstrators, the killing of protesters, etc. The list is endless and it is almost as if 1986 never happened at all.
Flipflopping definitions
Hence, for us to have a decent democratic life, and not a kind of democracy where flipflopping on historical definitions becomes a great pastime, let us strengthen our moral fiber and face all blackmailers together to make them retreat from their posturings as lovers of our country. No they do not love our country but themselves, their plans for rising up the political ladder in this country, to rule and for people to bow down to them. Those are not the leaders that we need in our country.
Let us reflect again and again on what we truly are. We are a people whose spiritual strength is being eroded day in and day out by the kind of occurrences in our country – from a divided south, to environmental degradation of fishkills and landslides, a Church that refuses to see the realities of women’s and couples’ burden of feeding huge families by insisting on its stand against reproductive health and who insist on their forgetting what sex with love means, to an economic system that allows the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer -- that makes the Central Bank a patsy while banks deduct and deduct from and up to the last centavo of the depositors’ savings; a Central Bank that allows pawnshops to rig their charges, as they make pawned renewals a chance to impose service charges again instead of just interests; and so forth and so on. Our financial system is truly a boggling maze of closed and open fists.
Actually, we need nurturing to carry on living so as not to resort to violent means that will render our country a battleground between the haves and the have-nots. We need leaders who have that moral strength to resist the residual effects of a dictatorial rule in this country. We need them to make us remember and not bury our great noble historical memories.
We also need to make our definitions of heroism clearer to the youth so that they would grow up knowing that a hero or heroine is not only someone who would die for the country, but one who knows how to bring the country through a noble path that is corrupt-free and a genuine server of the peoples’ needs.
Lastly, Third World countries like ours could be an easy captive for affluent groups that are out to destroy all the respect for human rights in order to make a profit and gain political power. Hence, let us ask the United Nations to put up a covenant among all nations on how to define heroism and how to honor heroes and heroines. By having a UN covenant, all countries would be on alert against allowing neo-Nazis and pro-dictators to exist, rise up and gain power again.
A lifetime is not really enough to strengthen true democracy as a way of life. Hence the struggle remains and we need to face it squarely and strongly, morally speaking.
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