Category Archive for: aktibismo

komentaryo

month three of P-Noy: notes of a pinay*

and so it must be said, that September might have been the best month ever for P-Noy, at least compared to those first two months where things just weren’t going his way, or his way just seemed to be going wrong.

the past month, P-Noy conveniently left the country for a visit to the US at around the same time that the Incident Investigating and Review Committee (IIRC) submitted its report on the August 23 hostage tragedy to Malacanang. in the midst of questions on the report — on the fact that it was sent to China before it was revealed to us, on the fact that what we finally saw lacked the section on the IIRC’s recommendations — P-Noy left, with a 57-person delegation to go to the US and address a United Nations delegation.

and as they celebrated the 25 MILLION PESOS to be spent on that trip, it became clear that we were really just hungover from GMA and the kind of spending she did, that we are out to just draw these comparisons, forgetting that 25 MILLION PESOS is a fluggin’ huge amount for any trip. this amount, given the number of travel companions of P-Noy (which apparently includes his barber, baka nga naman humaba ang hair niya, baket ba), could be bigger than that of the Queen of England‘s (oh but maybe sister Kris would be proud?).

but let’s forget about that amount, why don’t we? after all, what should matter is that he has done well, he has done us proud. he delivered a speech at the UN General Assembly, where he promised justice and the fulfillment of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, where he enjoined the world to come up with its own people power (naks) towards balancing inequality and finding unity (naks ulit).

never mind that injustices continue in the country, ones that for some reason P-Noy doesn’t want to handle differently from his predecessor: there are the extrajudicial killings and the forced disappearances of activists, there remain political prisoners including the Morong 43.  maybe P-Noy needs to be reminded that the UN itself had sent Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to the country in 2007, and he promptly “convincingly attributed” these injustices to the armed forces. now i imagine that the P-Noy government thinks (1) that those armed forces aren’t his, which therefore absolves him of responsibility, and (2) that he has delegated this to CHR Head Etta Rosales who will promptly act on this.

if the former is true, then P-Noy has every reason to Free All Political Prisoners, yes? if the latter is true, then P-Noy has every reason to Free All Political Prisoners, yes.

but there’s more to that US trip than just that UN speech. P-Noy also brought home the bacon, the ham, some eggs to boot, all of which are extensions of or improvements on previous agreements with transnational American companies, none of which mean being freed from our foreign debt, something that was offered to Cory during her time, something that i wish P-Noy would ask for now, because i have to believe that it’s possible to repeal all debt.

more than anything else, versus how this US trip might have “saved” the Philippines in whatever way (including meeting Obama, naks, one more time!), the fact is that it was P-Noy who was saved by this trip from what was going on in Manila while he was away.

there was the question of jueteng, the ensuing debate, the truth that what’s needed is a creative alternative to it, versus its abolition which is downright impossible. make the government alternatives better than the illegal jueteng, and it will kill the latter. send me an email if you want a copy of this proposal, which really is premised on good ol’ common sense and a whole lot of living in a province where jueteng lords it over.

there was the attempted demolition of a squatter community in North Edsa QC, in favor of the Ayalas who are going to build (another!) mall on what was government property. now i don’t know about P-Noy, but conversations must be had with people from squatters’ communities because only then will he find that (1) they are squatters in Manila because they are victims of land grabbing and its contingent devaluation of rural livelihood in the provinces to big landowners (like the Cojuangcos) and developers (like the Ayalas); and (2) some of these individuals and households put out money to have the right to this space: there’s always money exchanged between squatters/vendors and local government officials and police. this is all under the table of course, and more than anything explains why Pinoys who live in squatters areas think they have a right to the space. the province-to-city migration meanwhile tells us what the government needs to develop for the squatter problem to be solved. (and pray tell, anti-squatter people, how it is productive that you are nothing but anti-squatter people who are ready to pounce on these people?)

ah, all these P-Noy left behind for his OICs to handle or mishandle. when he finally came home, he did so with a bang by saying that he was now for a birth control and family planning policy, which does tie in — though not completely — with the Reproductive Health Bill.

i can only cross all my fingers and toes that P-Noy doesn’t back down in the face of this Pinoy Church. that he doesn’t back down in the face of the devout Catholics in his life, which include his sisters.

that he doesn’t fear excommunication, reprimand, the loss of the Pinoy Church’s support. because in fact it’s about time that we see the separation of Church and State in this country. because only then will women cease to be sacrificial lambs to notion(s) of morality and correctness, the ones that maims and kills them every day.

come on P-Noy, you can do it!

*because the Aquino sisters are already counting down the months to their brother’s and family’s freedom from us all, seeing us as the burden in their lives as if their brother didn’t choose to run for office and didn’t want to win.

kultura

relevant RockEd culture: notes on contemporary Pinoy rakenrol

The noise is overwhelming. SaGuijo isn’t made for long conversations with friends, not even when you’re all outside sitting at the farthest table from the entrance, having drinks and cigarettes. The truth is you’ve been here since dinnertime when it was empty and bright. You almost forgot it was the place of noise and crowds and youth, the one you hadn’t gone to in a while.

It had been a long day and, both emotionally and literally, food was what you needed. You also wanted to get eating out of the way while it was quiet enough to have a meal. The bagoong rice, salpicao and tokwa’t baboy, and ice-cold San Mig Lite seemed about right. Except that it was already noisy in your head, the kind of noise that apparently can’t be erased by a filled stomach. You came from the Maximum Security Compound of Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa, and after two years met an old friend—one who’s been there for almost a decade, the one for whom freedom is such a remote possibility, you cannot even see it.

The NGO Rock Ed was reason for that visit to Bilibid. Every Wednesday of every week, a bunch of prisoners expect Gang Badoy to arrive and teach them some creative writing.

the rest is up at pulse.ph!

komentaryo

the travesty of the Pinoy Church 2: life and death in Quiapo

today, the Pinoy Catholic Church gathered people to pray away the President’s decision to educate all Filipinos about family planning and give them the right to choose what to do. they also gathered to pray away the RH Bill and the probability that it will be passed into law.

the Pinoy Church elders invoke the name of the President’s mother: she wouldn’t do this, they say, she was close to bishops, she was saintly, she listened to the Church. Archbishop Aniceto says: “the country must learn to embrace the gift of life and to defend it against the ‘culture of death’.”

the Pinoy Church’s faithful carried placards with photos of aborted fetuses.

this connection between family planning/birth control/the RH Bill and aborted fetuses is a lie that the Pinoy Church has sold pretty well. they speak of contraceptives and abortifacients as one and the same, they speak of artificial family planning in the same vein as killing off babies. this is a lie.

any definition of contraception will tell you that Pinoy Church elders are wrong: contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, injectibles, condoms do not kill babies. they keep women from conceiving.

there is no baby, there is no abortion. in fact there is nothing in the woman’s uterus (which she solely owns by the way). there’s no nothing.

except 11 women who die during childbirth every day, women who get pregnant emotionally and physically unprepared for it, women who can barely survive the pregnancy, women who leave their babies because they don’t know what else to do. women who are unprotected by the State, are ill-informed if not uneducated about their rights to their bodies, their right to their lives.

and right there in Quiapo, where the CBCP wanted to pray away the RH Bill, women have found and bought bottles labelled pamparegla (to force menstruation) and pampalaglag (to force an abortion). right there in Quiapo, in front of that beautiful Church, countless Filipino women have gone to pray for forgiveness as they give the tablets and syrups and liquid in bottles a test drive. right there in Quiapo countless women have gone and disappeared for an hour or two or three, to risk their lives on beds and in rooms inhabited by women and girls like them, who don’t know what else to do. some or many of these women die, we don’t know for sure: they fall off the radar as they enter these spaces.

the CBCP prayed in Quiapo today, prayed against the RH Bill, family planning, birth control. prayed against the culture of death. prayed for the culture of life.

and right there in Quiapo, the travesty of the Pinoy Church could only be clearer than the bottles of pampalaglag that surrounded them. as they insist on valuing life, they have by their own refusal to give women the right to their bodies, been insisting on the culture of death all this time.

komentaryo

the travesty of the Pinoy Church 1

because on the one hand: it will tell its followers abortion is a sin, those women who do it, they are sinners, they are irresponsible. all you, who use contraception, you are committing abortion. you are sinners. you are immoral.

on the other: they will refuse any form of education that has the word sex in it. yes, even when in the same sentence as sex, is the word responsibility. oh no! this Pinoy Church would rather think that every Filipino is a Catholic (#1) and is therefore a follower of all the Church’s rules (#2). that because of these two things, they will not sin, and they will not need to be educated on sex. because they already know the rules of abstinence and the rule of sex only after and within marriage.

this is ideal, yes, but it is unrealistic. and this is at the core of my issues with the Catholic Church, Pinoy-style. it refuses to see anything other than what it wants to see: a bunch of sinners, all of us who don’t follow their rules, who question their insistence on abstinence, who go against what they believe about sex and libog.

common sense tells us this: how do we listen to priests who, as a matter of marrying God, don’t even (shouldn’t!) think about having sex, or libog, or anything related to it. that is of course when they aren’t to throwing a sermon or two — along with some threats! — at their brethren.

and they threaten us all with what? there’s hell, for one thing. and for another, the threat of a civil disobedience campaign, and some good ol’ (but denied on the late night news) excommunication for P-Noy. and every other person who says yes (finally!) to birth control, to couples exercising their right to plan their families, to women deciding on their bodies, because we are the only ones who have the right to it.

any woman who has a sense of the real conditions of women in this country would also know not to fear excommunication, not to fear hell. because in fact, we are already in a worst version of hell here, in this space where we aren’t protected in any way, where that finger of blame is easily and quickly pointed in our direction, where half the time we feel like witches being burned at the stake.

the saddest thing? because we have been told so often that our voices are the bane of the Pinoy Church’s existence, we have started to believe it too, and become uncertain about crucial laws that have yet to be passed, but which are ultimately the things we need. and deserve.

the Reproductive Health Bill is our right as women. as women who admit to having and/or wanting sex (within and outside of marriage), as women who want to keep safe and healthy and productive despite the label of sinner that the Pinoy Church has stamped on our foreheads.

we believe all these and act on it, because truth to tell, we are also women who are about the things that this Pinoy Church teaches us: love and marriage and happy endings. yes, we dream of these things. but we can only be as liberated as our bodies are free. we can only be liberated when we cease to fear our bodies, when we stop thinking that all these things we feel and want to do are scary sinful things.

the travesty that is this Pinoy Church is that as it threatens us with hell, it creates this nation where women are without an RH Bill to protect them, where women die at childbirth and from sexually transmitted diseases, where women’s bodies are unprotected, as are their emotions.

if this isn’t hell, i don’t know what is.

kultura

saved by salvatus! notes on the ateneo art awards 2010

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Arts and Books Section, August 23 2010.

Because Mark Salvatus and his work inspired by the Quezon Provincial Jail would be the most logical choice for the Ateneo Art Award 2010, to this critic who has seen most these artists’ exhibits when they came out in galleries and museums across the metro, and who does insist on relevance and resistance, and its possibilities in art.

Of the 12 short-listed artists with works in exhibition at the Shangri-la Plaza Mall’s Grand Atrium, Salvatus’ installation “Secret Garden” and painting “Do or Die” were the most outright political, speaking of the lives we’d rather forget about, the silence that is as noisy as our screams. The jail ain’t a pretty place, especially in the Philippines. The ugly ain’t the usual set of works that we see the Ateneo Art Awards (AAA) liking, and let’s not even begin about the political.

The argument would be of course, that everything is political. And looking at the manner in which this AAA exhibit exists can only be telling. In the context of this high-end mall, with mostly foreign shops, the second floor lobby filled with contemporary (and young) Pinoy art just seemed so out of place. Or maybe it was perfect. (more…)