Category: people power

environment & revolution

if junie kalaw were alive he’d be saying i-told-you-so, just like odette alcantara.   junie and odette were our leading environmentalists, pioneers, who didn’t live to see the great floods wrought by ondoy & pepeng [and some dam(ned) officials] but who warned us often enough since the 1980s that this would happen one day unless we changed, radically transformed, our politics and lifestyles.

i never got to meet odette but junie i knew very well.   youngest son of maximo m. kalaw, the author, educator, and fierce advocate of philippine independence from the united states in the early 1900s.   met junie in ’84 through jorge arago and it was as researcher and managing editor of his journal Alternative Futures that i learned all about the sad state of our environment, thanks to bad government policies.

in ’97 anvil came out with junie’s book Exploring Soul & Society, a compilation of papers on sustainable development published and presented in different publications and fora here and abroad from1986 to 1995.   the first part, Environment & Revolution, opens with a call to empower ourselves a la EDSA.

finally the time has come.   john nery is correct,  the political dynamic has changed, the environment is an agenda waiting for a president.

A LETTER TO FUTURE FILIPINOS

by Maximo ‘Junie’ Kalaw

Our story began more than 14 billion years ago with a burst of cosmic fire and the evolution of our solar system. Ten billion years later, life forms were spawned on our planet, followed by the emergence of human consciousness, which formed and informed different cultures.

Early myths speak of a Being who created us, our land, forests, rivers, mountains, oceans, and all living creatures. This Being — known as Apo to the Lumads of Mindanao, Kabunian to the Kalingas of the Cordilleras, and Bathala to the Negritos of Central Luzon — imbued all creation with a sacred potential.

Beginning in the 16th century, however, waves of colonialism washed over our island archipelago. The Spaniards, then the Americans, then the Japanese brought with a different source of power and revelation about the nature of life. The Divine was driven up to the heavens and life hereafter. Nature was viewed as a mere resource for making mechanistic and utopian dreams come true, legimitizing conquest, exploitation, and two world wars.

Five centuries later we find ourselves at a critical moment in our history. Our survival as a people is imperiled by the destruction of our tropical rain forest, the erosion of our topsoil, and the killing of our coral reefs. We are shutting down, ierreversibly and at an alarming rate, the very systerms that support life.

Yet our population continues to increase, even as more than half of us live on incomes inadequate to feed an average-sice family. Because every one of us owes foreign creditors over Php 3,000, we sell what remains of our precious natural resources at undervalued prices and allocate more than 43 % of our foreign exchange to servicing foreign loans. If present conditions continue, the sustainability of our society is doubtful.

We cling, however, to the belief that grave crisis is a correspondingly great opportunity for change. This crisis is pushing us to take a different view of ourselves, our Inang Bayan, our planetary home, and the process we call development.

It is an opportunity to recover our cultural identity and affirm the values of our indigenous peoples; to create with them an alternate way of caring for the life that flows through all beings; to translate this vision into new forms of villages, farms and factories, transportation and communication; and to live a sustainable spirituality which translates the teachings of great spiritual traditions into norms and ethics that can guide the realities of large wholes and systems.

It is an opportunity to empower ourselves anew, as we did at the EDSA revolution, by participating in decisions that affect our future. We need to create a completely different chapter in our story as a people and as a species where the predominant ethics of our actions will be based on the authority of Nature and our interconnectedness with her, thus empowering us to transform state, party, and church bureaucracy.

It means the exercise of a different kind of politicalwill, that is, a new politics of facilitating the flow of life/resources rather than accumulating it as political bounty. It means the exercise of true service in the noble enterprise of creating a Filipino community within the sacred community of life on earth.

On our ability to transform ourselves rests your future.

Time Magazine, December 1990

people power, rain or shine

it was a memorable day that we all got to share, thanks to the marvel of television.   the cathedral rites were beautiful, fr. arevalo’s eulogy sublime, and the military honors stately and dignified.   the family continued to amaze and warm the heart,sharing their mom, sharing their grief, never mind that it meant being exposed to the cruel glare of lights and cameras and nosy, sometimes uncouth, media.   thank you, ballsy, pinky, noynoy, viel, and kris!

but the best was yet to come.   and it happened out in the streets, the people’s turf, where yellow crowds gathered in great numbers, lining the streets or marching with the casket, flashing the Laban sign and chanting “Co-ry! Co-ry! Co-ry!”   it reminded me so much of the snap election campaign, when nakarating kami ng mga magulang ko hanggang lucena, quezon para lang maki-rally kay cory.

there was a brief moment when i asked myself, where were all these people, where were we, when cory was leading street protests asking gloria to resign post-garci and later in support of jun lozada?   why were we not there for cory then?   but now i see that it doesn’t really matter anymore.   what matters is that we have rediscovered cory & ninoy and what they stood for.   and i have no doubt that when the time is right, People Power will rise again, rain or shine.

in cory’s wake

when ninoy died and his remains lay in bloodied state sa times street, pumila kami that night, my husband and i, to pay our respects, never mind that marcos might get mad or his military might be watching.   we just had to pay homage to this man who won our respect when he, alone, suffered jail for seven years and seven months rather than bow to a dictator, and when he dared come home from exile because the filipino is worth dying for.

past the gate a couple of kids handed us a black ribbon each, a small strip with aspili.   the patio too was small, the space enough only for the line of people snaking single-file around the coffin for a quick hello and goodbye, as quick as the pass-by cory’s coffin i’m now seeing on tv.   it was also very quiet.   the house was closed, there was no sign of any family or friends.   except for two or three watchful guys standing by (security siguro) we, the people, were alone with ninoy.   a starkly simple affair.

with cory, aba, sosyal!   what a case-study of a scene.    the huge venues and tv cameras, the people quietly filing by the coffin while family and friends sit around, move around, make chika nearby.   how rare, masses and elite sharing the same space happily, clear divisions and all.   the silent masa are just happy to be allowed a glimpse of cory one last time, never mind that they enter by a different gate, and are not treated like guests and offered seats.   the elite are just happy that the masses are there too, imagine if they weren’t, what a snub, how embarrassing.

interesting, too, that gma the once lucky bitch is now the the odd woman out.   indeed, she’s damned if she goes, damned if she doesn’t.   pero dapat kaya niyang magpunta.   just as dapat kaya ng mga aquino na tanggapin siya.   of course kung type niyang magdrama, she could always do the unexpected, like, line up with the people, why not, pay her respects to cory first, before facing cory’s clan.   i’m sure even kris would be lost for words  (well, at least for a while ;).

of course it would mean gma counting on the people to be too awed by her pa-humble chutzpah to do anything but welcome her among their ranks.   but what if the people remember only that cory had asked her to resign.   what if they do an edsa instead, like, you know, stop her from getting any closer to cory, kapitbisig human-shieldeffect.   lol.   that would be the end of her.   safer not to cross lines.   safer to face kris.