Cory Aquino, freedom and the Filipino way

With Cory Aquino's passing, the Filipino people once more are united under one sentiment - loss. She has been so many things to different people - a mother, a friend, a fighter for the oppressed and a woman of faith. The political context which produced the icon Cory Aquino is the not just responsible for inculcating in our national consciousness the need to grasp the interrelationship of responsible politics and moral accountability in the way we interrogate our understandings of social involvement and Filipino identity.

I first heard of the death of Ninoy Aquino as a child from my mother who told me Ninoy was a man of principle, one who is unafraid to stand for what is right even if it has to jeopardize his own personal comfort. Growing up I learned of the other players in that story - the Marcoses, Enrile, Ramos and Cardinal Sin. To me as a child, politics sounded more like an adult quarrel but as time went by my education in politics was birthed and nourished by curiosity for things larger than me. School added a lot more in this quest for understanding meaning, social consciousness and identity formation. My own heroes were forged for me by my teachers, by the media and by my own grasp of the events of EDSA Revolution.

Although she was interpreted for me by the media, Cory Aquino isn't hard to understand because she spoke the language common to many people - the need for freedom and meaning . As such she aligned with the heroes in my childhood - Jose Rizal, Lapu-lapu, Andres Bonifacio, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington. What made her more alive was the fact that she was very much alive and accessible through the events of the day. Understanding her role today for many fo us and acknowledging her contribution to Philippine democracy will be short-sighted if we fail to continue in our current mandate to be watchers of our own freedom. We have to be very much aware of the need to guard freedom and consider it a precious gift, one thta can be abused and one that can be easily ignored.

As an educator I often think about the inevitable and intricate inflection of politics in the discipline I teach. That along the appreciation of literary texts there is an unspoken obligation to teach students the responsibility of carefully planning out one's politics, one's philosophy and one's nationalistic sentiments. Although I still try to find actual and specific expressions of this responsibility, I find it rather unsurprising to see that some students will never get the value of history and the role it plays in contemporary sensibility. The young people of today rarely speak of politics because it's contentious and uncomfortably partisan. Their vocabularies are full of myopic humor and shallow rants, mostly focused on personal discomfort and abused rights. It's about the good things about life and rarely about causes or overarching world-views. I guess this is a failure on part of the teachers who fail to educate the young on the necessity of politics, convictions and active social transformation. Many if not most teachers in many schools have abandoned that call towards educating the young about the involvement of the personal and the national.

Cory stood for freedom and Filipinos ought to be grateful for the sacrifices she made because she loved this nation dearly. Many loved only their pockets and their own personal comfort. The Filipino despite his poverty continues to celebrate this although after all the furor and fatigue, he will go back and confront the empty table at dinner.

The Power of Fatigue

This seems to be a ridiculous title. How could there be strength in weakness? or purpose in chaos?
There is one good thing about being tired. It's knowing that the body needs rest, that it has it's limits to and that we cannot choose to squeeze everything in the moment. The demands of a fast-paced society has reinforced this lie if not happily preached it among the working class. Achievement is found in busy-ness and the clamor for accomplishment sent to our ears by our workplace.

When I get tired I cannot help but be tired. It is something I cannot stop or bury in smiles or pleasantries. And because we are always cajoled to be happy, to be always fun and to be on the move there seems to be no place for fatigue. It is always demonized as a curse; something we cannot be happy to be with. But there is wisdom in finding the end of the rope. It is a time for reassessment and recalculation of priorities. We get tired for a variety of reasons. Some are self-induced foolish habits to do the impossible, others are inevitable consequences of a passion filled heart and others are simply form so injustice.

Being tired brings me back to thinking - about what matters significantly and whether the reason for my own weariness is of great value or simply a consequent of a foolish endeavor.

Why "Transformers" matters!

Pop culture has never been the same. These decades have seen not only the proliferation of action packed movies but also of representations of TV shows reminiscent to a generation that grew up in the 80's and 90's. The action sequences blow the mind of audiences, specially the young ones who appreciate the visual stimulation and the magic of screen time performances.

But if one asks the older crowd who flock to these cinemas they would perhaps have a bigger reason for going. Aside from the flashy onslaught of screen time and sounds that pummel the ear and shake the THX movie houses, they have another reason.

Movies like Transformers (along with other remakes that were lifted from TV series and hero-infested Marvel spin offs) strike a chord in the hearts of the young adults. I am of course speaking of my generation - young professionals (and even the unemployed) who were jumping for joy when they first saw Optimus Prime transform and hear the familiar voice of the leader of the Autobots.

I have a few students who admire the awesomeness of Transformers perhaps because of the robots and their human-like personalities. But I have to find a few who can articulate the same dynamics that make this movie so appealing to yuppies - males mostly, although I know a few yuppie girls who like it too.

Transformers simply utilizes the common themes in our day to day narratives - a struggle to make a difference in life, to make choices and jump into action that will help others, to be part of something bigger and ultimately to matter in the end. The robotic figures serve as archetypes of heroes with abilities prized by individuals who feel limited by culture, economics and geography.
In other words, Transformers does not only serve as a substitute for the primal need to be known but also as a vehicle for articualting convictions firmly held in a shared assumption that others matter, that one can make a difference and that limits do not define a person (at least not completely). The movie helps bring about that need and speaks it to a visually stimulated crowd about the convictions of a generation living in the desensitizing power of boredom and apathy.

Nearing Thirty-Five

Unoriginal like my prodigious race
celebrating copy-cat culture and enduring
relentless mutterings of my inner angsts;
Always desiring and never attempting,
With dreams held by both hands;
Clasped with the stubborness of a romantic.
Caressing the tender promises of high hopes.
Born out of studies of thick tomes that
Blister the eyes and produce the opiate
sunderings of wistful ambitions.

Trodden by the biting realities of economics
And the indolent genes of a world brought up in foolish hopes;
Tantalizing one-night stands
With vain-glorious bill-board texts and post-colonial discourses
Those that draw smiles on nutty academics
In their comfortable jargons of white light.

Unnerved and numbed at the same rhythmic
Perturbations nourished by fires in the bosom:
Ever remorseful of mediocre victories
Chanting with the dying an ode of elegiac alliterations.
Words, senseless and totalizing -
Meanings detached and yet slowly drifting into
recognizable patterns of delusions,
Begging for systematizing wholeness
crouching at the door of the phantasmagoric wisps of discarded cigarettes

Knocked bitterly bye the eternal and gnawing hunger pangs
And putting much faith in the much maligned apocaylpse
of a lost world and a matrix of reconfigured nexus
of new sensibilities and new habits.
Sustained by the image of the real and yet cavorting secretly with the longings of a new
horizon antithetical to conservative leanings lodged in the soul.

Conflicted and yet serene
Desiring and yet appeased
Revolting and pacifying the turmoil of the imposed platitudes
Meaningful and yet chaos personified in the hum-drum of postmodern epehemeras.

Oxymoronic, paradoxical and coherently brutal
At every suggestion of linearity
Morbidly divine or divinely morbid?
O! The dying values of my age!
Swallowed in the fleeting indictments of technopoly
Hyper-real and stochastic representations of the undead
May the last gasps of the cold earth sweep this industrial sewage of recycled
kaleidoscopes of what they call literary and cultural

Blistful religion of the ancients! Onomatopeic rants of a bygone age
Does faith abnegate itself at science's triumph?
Shall the spiritual be reduced to the mathematical?
Will poetry be cast aside as mere hiccups of the flatulent?
And history be nothing but the inevitable narrative that is to come?

Where is the sting of death?
Where is the liberty of light?
Where is the power of the text?

Am I then who I am supposed to be?
Or am I a singular positionality of consciousness?
A coherent ruse for the inevitable implosion of meaning's loss?

Another year of musings await, one filled with blind terror and fear
For now it is a localized pain of the abdomen, acute and undignified.
And the future is nothing but Faith in Transcendence
And whereof one cannot speak, there of one must be silent.