Category Archive for: komentaryo

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.

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.

komentaryo

Dep Ed needs to do its homework

because really, as far as teaching is concerned, Dep Ed‘s No Homework Policy is just unfair. to keep us from giving kids homework on a Friday, means practically starting from scratch on a Monday, difficult as it already is to make students snap out of the two-day vacay. homework is suppose to keep kids practicing what they learned throughout the week, even when it’s just a matter of doing a couple of exercises in Math and English, even when it’s only a matter of asking questions about the environment for Science. the point of homework is to have students think about your subject even when they don’t see you for two days.

now as far as parents are concerned, i don’t know that they’d like to have idle kids in front of the TV, or wanting to go to the mall, with nothing better to do over the weekend. it would be fantastic if every Filipino household was equipped with libraries, and reading was second nature. but we all know reading and books are leisure in this country, especially for public school students and parents, even teachers. i imagine that if there’s anyone who can be happy about the No Homework Policy and the bonding time it creates, it’s Henry Sy.

the Dep Ed memo says that this was borne of parents’ complaints that homework was robbing them of quality time with their kids. the response to these parents should be: homework and education is quality time with your children. and how many parents actually complained about homework being too much, versus being difficult?

because the issue of homework is in fact tied neatly together with the problems of public education in this country, with the low pay of teachers that keep them from being more involved in students’ learning, given the civil service code that allows tenured and regularized gov’t employees and teachers to stay on in positions regardless of bad teaching habits, or not teaching at all. this means that many teachers have the freedom to make life difficult for students, by giving them homework they can’t answer, by piling requirements on as if the students can understand, or afford, it.

now this the parents would have difficulty with, and can complain about. but homework per se?

homework, regardless of what day it’s given, is NOT a bad thing. in the hands of good teachers, homework that’s given on a Friday sets the tone of the Monday discussion, and the rest of the following week. putting together a lesson plan requires that a teacher also thinks about what post-lesson exercises to give, and these necessarily happen at home.

now if the issue is that teachers don’t give relevant homework or tend to pile it on as a matter of powertripping, then a No Homework Policy won’t solve that. in fact, this only means that they will give more homework throughout the week, which means students will suffer the backlash of a Dep Ed decision that’s supposedly for them to begin with.

and really, this doesn’t help the morale of teachers who still care about teaching and their students’ learning, despite the lack of security of tenure, the little pay, and how they suffer in the hands of those older than they are.

if there’s anything that the No Homework Policy reveals, it’s that Dep Ed needs to do its homework.

komentaryo

month two of P-Noy: notes of a pinay or the honeymoon is over*

It seems fitting to write this now that Noynoy has finally taken responsibility for the August 23 hostage tragedy. And yes that is what it was, in fact it was a crisis, by 12 nn, if you were watching it from 9AM, like I was. In fact if you were watching it from the very beginning, when all it was was a minor news report, with no live footage yet, you’d know (1) to thank media, for once, and (2) that it was always Noynoy’s call, always Malacanang’s call, and it was obvious that here, the call was to NOT do anything other than watch local officials, who is now apparently only Isko Moreno for the City of Manila. in fact, we saw him so much during the hostage crisis, that I almost forgot Mayor Lim was, in fact, Mayor.

I also forgot we had a president. Pramis. Early in the day, the question was which action star cum senator would come to the rescue, my bet was Jejomar himself, though he ain’t action star or senator, but you get my drift. Over lunch, I wondered what was taking so long. By meryenda, my question was WTF?

But of course the past month also meant many things other than the hostage taking that was allowed to turn into a tragedy. At the end of month two there was sudden silence about Hacienda Luisita, after all that noise in the beginning of the month, with Christian Monsod calling the HL lawyer out on what it was they were actually doing to farmers, that is, making them believe that what they were getting was all they were due. There too, were press releases on the plan to reconfigure basic education into 12 years, which of course the Magsaysay Awardees have said is beside the point, and really seems to be a decision that’s without common sense. Any sane person can see that it isn’t quantity, it’s quality. This is even more true for the public school system, but how many of the higher Dep Ed officials have entered a public school in the past two years?  That is the question. An even better question? Why aren’t relevant organizations and partylists, teachers and parents, being consulted about, and listened to, in relation to this major change in a system off of which they live and have been created? And let’s not forget that fab moment when P-Noy said that at the end of the day, he is the commander in chief, and therefore Rear Admiral Feliciano Angue had no right to question the demotion he had been given. Well.

Ah, but then these things have been overshadowed yes? By the aftermath of the hostage crisis and the death of innocent foreigners. Suffice it to say that we deserve it all, everything the world has to say, and even more so after the bungled reaction(s) of government, including P-Noy’s post-crisis. And while I agree with de Quiros that it’s better late than never, goodness gracious, that can only be true if the late reaction is in fact the correct one. It is beyond me how a president with a communications group could be so messed up in, well, communicating.

But maybe it’s no surprise. After all, we have media that can barely survive the aftermath of the hostage tragedy, too. Yes, there should be a lot of shame here, flunking the test and all. At least GMA 7 turned upon itself and chose to be reflexive right away, though it’s difficult to forgive Mel Tiangco for asking about P-Noy’s love life at the presscon. ABS-CBN 2’s Maria Ressa was on a roll on Twitter the whole time the hostage taking was going on, and it was clear that she wasn’t going to be apologetic. Instead, she is going to burn bridges, and put salt in HK Chinese wounds. And now that Pia Hontiveros has written about her experience on the ground (we saw Pia on TV when there was talk that Mendoza wanted media people to go into the bus), and Patricia Evangelista too, on her take about P-Noy’s handling of it, this becomes the easy question: pray tell, ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs, was there a memo?

Are the Lopezes finally burning that Aquino bridge?

Abangan.

*because if 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 run for office, well, this honeymoon’s obviously over.