My Stint In Capoocan, A Changing Community

BIMBO CABIDOG

Years ago, a new acquaintance asked me to help in their municipality’s planning for comprehensive medium-term development. I have used the buzz words CMTD many times in conversation and seminars where I shared inputs. But wow, to know a local government unit take them seriously and actually want me to be part of the planning process was beyond joy. It was an offer I could not refuse (apologies to Michael Corleone).

So I came on the scheduled activity-launching conference. You cannot overhighlight my blush at the presence of village chiefs (in full force), their leader – the ABC president, the mayor, and the LGU’s designated Technical Working Group. The latter was composed of local heads of offices. I felt butterflies in my stomach. I had to forget about me, to stand before them.

My acquaintance really opened a door to three gold nuggets: an opportunity to grow, an official privilege to participate in local history, and an exciting time to live. Her role (not exactly her position) was vital to her town’s government machinery being revved up to a new direction. I was just vital at being maybe a replica of The Nobody, unsure if my kind truly has the right to earn a living. She made it sure, however, that the stint meant monetary gain.

Well, no pretence, I wasn’t exactly up to that. My professional credentials were not worth a second thought, simply because I had none. I had only some sort of talent at speech and at standing before an audience without melting, a product of trying it all those years living on the edge and God’s pity. Yes, I got skills in fiercely critical political-economic analysis from the University of Hard Knocks.

Anyway, a measure of currency for a man’s worth wasn’t what I was after. I just sought to pay my rent, settle monthly bills, and above everything bring food to the table. What I sought wasn’t pay but wherewithal. And hey, the self-esteem booster was great.

I spent days there. The days became months and years. The place offered a bailiwick to my dreams for me, community and country. I just found myself one day caring for the people, their futuristic visions, the collective directions their barangays take. I participated in their change until I felt already belonging to them, more than I belonged to the only town I called home.

Capoocan, the municipality I am referring to, was at the crossroads of two divergent ideas. One was of departure from the past. The other was of permanence. No few among the local folks resisted change. They clung dearly to their economic fiefdoms, their traditional political turfs, and their old rule. But the ground was shifting underneath. This was of the people being introduced by a rapidly changing world to new ways of living and of marshaling their fates.

As the ground shifted, the resisters would themselves be swept away. Not just a handful lost foothold, not of course by revolution, but by attrition. Old means burst like old wine skins full of the new spirit. Once you take the new, you close the past for all times. And you sweep the clingers to the leftovers of history.

It was at this dynamic period of a community on the cusp of fresh developments that I grounded my fantasies at social transformation. I entered it not presuming knowledge or far better know-how, but as an avid learner from the masses. You have to be a participant of change to learn.

Sometimes, amid discouragements I kept answering myself: you know how it is in this sphere, with the overused and abused traditions for everyone’s self-aggrandizement. I then honed my teeth in the politics of local governance. I also negotiated the tricky intricacies of electoral politics, handling one campaign or two. I was lucky to have my learning curb, no PhDs.

An arena of engagement with so much for everyone’s personal advancement and egotistic fill would surprise if it has no intrigues coming from various points 380 degrees. Yet, I was still surprised to be hit by one. And that hit profoundly one’s ego and bat for a career. But my survivor instinct taught me how not to fight and steered me out of troubled waters.

Include the above in the lessons. Development is not merely propelled by theoretical dialectics. It is impelled by contention in real fields of battles. It is about people at odds with each other, persons challenged to do best by their opposites.

Fear of saying goodbye to a sole means of living as always would soften my rockbound stances. I compromised on lifelong doctrines. I yielded high ground, not only by inch but by square kilometer, for at the back of it all was uncertainty. Piecework wages and talent fees proved occasional. From one deal to the other, I had to deal all over again.

In the long intervals of unemployment, I slammed into literally hungry years. For the family, hunger would become a fact of life, not to speak of electricity repeatedly being cut off for unpaid arrears, and a landlady at pains how to evict five prospectively homeless mortals with six months of forgone rentals.

But Capoocan has been more than an on-and-off engagement. It was a job that you care with all your life, because it is you. It runs in your bloodstreams, since you saw a society blighted by an oppressive order and deprived of development. It awakened every morning since your eyes began to see people brutalized by exploitation. You take a rest. But you always await one more nostalgic round of the good fight.

Comprehending Poverty

BIMBO CABIDOG

When we say our goal is to eradicate or reduce poverty, what do we mean? Sorting this out may already crystallize half of the way to get there. Comprehending poverty is important.

Poverty remains a global concern. Circa 2000, member states of the United Nations convened (for three days) the largest gathering of world leaders in history. The summit ratified eight UN Millennium Development Goals. First of them was the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

For the first time, the issue of global poverty figured in the agenda of states. The cut-off for the fulfillment of the UNMDG was set at 2015. But for sure, four years thereafter, poverty continues to be a pervasive reality in many locations all over the world.  

The current world population is estimated to be 7.4 billion. Estimates also show the number of the poor throughout the globe to have been reduced to 10%, down from 36% in late 1990s. But despite the noted decline, billions of people especially in the southern hemisphere still could hardly meet basic needs.

The international poverty line is presently set at $1.90 per person per day. This is the amount of income or consumption an individual needs to meet the bare minimum requirements of existence. Incidences of folks living below the said threshold remain obstinately high among low-income countries and regions affected by conflicts or political upheavals.

Income of the bottom 40% among countries in East and South Asia has been reported to grow by 4.7% and 2.6% per year from 2010 to 2015 respectively. The impressive statistics nonetheless does not offset the steep social inequalities and lopsided concentration of wealth in a tiny few to date.

In 2015, more than a quarter of the world’s population survived on $3.20 per day, nearly half on less than $5.50 per day. International non-government organizations observe that those who own around one half of the globe’s resources and wealth are a handful they could fit in a bus.

The reality underlies the conventional definition of poverty as “pronounced deprivation of wellbeing.” It relates wellbeing to command over commodities. The poor are therefore those who do not have enough income to live on a sufficient amount of needs expressed in monetary terms.

The conventional view is inadequate, narrowly focuses on individual experience, and misses out on the social character of the problem. It is especially blind to the question of injustice. It is now recognized that being poor is not just living below the threshold of consumption socially necessary for humans.

The broader view is to consider wellbeing as the capability of the individual to function in society. This was particularly argued by Amartya Sen of India. Thus, poverty is to be deprived of wellbeing by not having the capability to function in society in various ways.

Approximately eight out of nine folks are said to fall under the broader approach, while merely one in eight is said to fall under income-poverty. The former highlights the imperative of much stronger and more inclusive growth specially for still developing societies.

Another study reflects on poverty as an ill-being that is local, specific and multidimensional. It also pertains to the various aspects by which a person is incapable of functioning in society, such as lack of access to education, clean water, health care and housing, or basic social services. Disenfranchisement, alienation, and exclusion in governance form part of it.

Determination of the various measures or dimensions of poverty are important to:

1. Keep the poor in the governance agenda
2. Identify them so as to target them for appropriate and highly responsive interventions
3. Monitor and evaluate policies, projects and other initiatives along this line
4. Evaluate the agencies, institutions and organizations intended to help the poor

In this regard, poverty indeed has no simple solution. But strategies at poverty eradication/reduction adopting a multidimensional approach can have meaningful indicators to focus attention on. It can, not only in quantitative but graphic terms, define what success is.

The multifarious dimensions of ill-being must be set as standards in measuring results of anti-poverty initiatives. On the other hand, making them disappear and income or consumption to solely stand out, ultimately ignores the socio-political context that sees poverty as an issue of justice, which in fact it is.

Deprivation of wellbeing is the outcome as well as manifestation of regimes of production and market that squeeze or bleed by a thousand cuts the laboring masses. It is a symptom of the malaise spawned by an economic relationship where particular classes in society prey upon others.

The above postulate of course warrants another longer discussion. This discussion shall end on what poverty in its various manifestations entails, for example: hardship, economic marginalization, powerlessness, vulnerability and social insecurity.

Without further elaboration and details of the mentioned dimensions or manifestations, poverty may already be comprehended as a broad malaise rooted in social injustice and the prevailing economic order. It is an issue not only of social equality but of social equity. Solution shall be charted accordingly.

The Present State of Lawlessness and Disorder

BIMBO CABIDOG

Hit and run at the West Philippine sea, victimizing Filipino fisher folk

When superior reason is forced to give in to the reason of superior force, madness reigns. This is now how the country is being ruled, Duterte-style.

In the judiciary, judges side not with justice, but with tyranny that has no use of the law anymore except as toilet paper. They sampled this abhorrent dictum by putting Senator Leila de Lima in jail with a fabricated case with ex-convicts in prison as false witnesses.

Authorities, who should uphold and protect the rights of the people, listen to the righteousness of might, not the might of righteousness. Whatever they are meant, rights no longer mean anything, for the law has no force. Force is the law.

The rule says that the law may be harsh, but it is the law. Dura lex sed lex. No more. The law is not law if it can’t be enforced. It does not allow ending human life whether by application of justice (there is no death penalty), or by extrajudicial means. But does its long arm yet catch those who do so? Today, they just freely and with impunity commit murder.

The President handles the Constitution as a sheaf of scratch paper. He threatens with jail or harm whoever dares to question his crazy ululations.  In many instances, he himself has been heard explicitly urging to kill. Do the institutions of justice hold him to account?

Tens of thousands are already dead in the wake of his war on drugs. Many of them were mere victims of what state authorities would wave off as collateral damage. But even the ones who were killed for being suspected to use or deal drugs were themselves pure and simple victims of the heinous crime of murder.

Under the barbaric campaign, families, relatives and friends of the dead now chafe in extreme grief. They are pained yet by a thirst for justice that they know to be merely wishful thinking. Has one felon been meted the fullest extent of the law? Law enforcement agencies and courts sweep or try to sweep the commission of the capital offenses under the rug.

The carnage for sure is palpable. It is continually being brought to the public eye by the lenses of the intrepid media. But the supposedly independent and co-equal magistrates who should look after it look the other way. The senators and congressmen shamelessly squelch investigations.

They have been mandated by the constitution to check abuse by Duterte. But they themselves have castrated their offices as co-equal entities to his. They have subsumed their authority to the rule of the pretentious strongman. They grovel before him and chorus Amen!

On the other hand, the unfortunate subjects who become recipients of extreme prejudice by the current regime are not even held to account anymore in the legal sense. They are just grabbed in the guise of Tokhang and summarily executed without due process.

These are the times now, sadder than during the dark years of the dictatorship, more tragic to the nation than the ruin and plunder wrought by Ferdinand Marcos, his dogs of war, cronies, and sycophants. All the social-reform, democratic, and economic gains of the past 33 years of post-Marcos recovery are now rushing down the drain to the gutter.

Contemporary historical revisionism (thanks to the vestiges of rapacity that are back with consummate vengeance) paints the period of one-man rule as a golden age. Yes, it was the golden age, not only of the suppression of the democratic rights of the people, but of the castration of the economy which saw three straight years of negative growth towards the end.  

It was the golden age of Ferdie’s and Imelda’s conjugal “kleptocracy” that shipped tons of gold and currency out of the country into hidden deposits abroad. But Duterte himself has gone to glorify that woebegone era, because he wants to copy Marcos.

Still, recent facts cannot be revised or denied. From a basket case, the sick man of Asia that was the Philippine economy during Marcos’s authoritarian plunder, soon after, went into high gear achieving levels of growth that made it Asia’s rising star three decades later. The country tamed its unruly public-borrowing and debt-service binge and put its fiscal balance sheets in order.

And for the first time, the former basket case even loaned $1 billion to global financial institutions signifying an enviable foreign reserves standing. For the first time also, it got investment grade from international credit ratings agencies. Now, it is on the verge of throwing all these to the wind.

The country used to be admired for its genial and well-mannered citizens. But those traits are also fast eroding. In public, the current leadership spews profuse mouthfuls of SOBs, FYs, other cusses and expletives almost every time he mounts the podium.

Duterte proudly talks about having two wives and two mistresses while yet flirting with others. He blurts misogynistic quips at will, jokes about rape, and exhorts soldiers to shoot female insurgents in the vagina. It seems that his audiences just love the charlatan.

As if the loathsome repertoire isn’t enough, one time he further spiced his sexist streak with the brag of lasciviously assaulting a housemaid in his adolescence and going to the bathroom to relieve. Taking cue from the maddening applause of his audience, he goes on from shelling libidinous dirt to vitiating decent individuals who merely points out flaws in his governance.

He calls stupid or idiot personalities of erudite learning just because they take a contrary view to his, like Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio. He behaves as if he is the only one who is, and will always be correct, in the whole solar system.

His rambling, discombobulated, incoherent and ungrammatical speeches are notorious not only for their nonsensical thought, but for unabashedly graphic sensuousness and insulting taunts against just any perceived opponent. Yet, he – potty mouth and all, just mesmerizes audiences.

Perhaps, the children who are taught at an early age good manners and right conduct are confused. But judging from how the people continue to give him high approval rating, here is a country that is turning to the love of vomit.

Here is a nation that is tending to lose not only its morals, but its soul. Alas, here is a nation losing its very nationhood.

The height of lawlessness and disorder is for citizens not to honor anymore their Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. This just happened when the president acted like a vassal of the People’s Republic of China siding with its rulers in the dispute of jurisdiction over the Philippine’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

He has not only sided with China but outdid the Chinese leadership in thrashing his own country’s constitutional provision on the eploitation of the West Philippine Sea exclusively by Filipinos. He imagined his counterpart Xi Jinping treating the basic charter of the country he is president of as merely good for wiping asses. Then he proceeds to take the position.

Yet, the president does not only mock the constitution he was sworn to protect, he consigned to the garbage can the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as well as the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration that affirmed the country’s jurisdiction over the length and breadth, features and resources of the West Philippine Sea. He dismisses as senseless the international covenants that uphold and protect the nation’s territorial integrity.

In the past three years and first half of the Duterte presidency, the Filipino people have endured historically the worst violations of their time-honored laws, their national sovereignty, and human rights. All these were to give in to his whim. All these were to yield to his lust for absolute rule even if it already shreds the very charter that put him in power. All these were to kowtow to his thinking of being always right.

He has not acted within the bounds set by law, nor fulfilled the functions and obligations mandated by his assumption to the highest office of the land. Three years were a uniquely long period to endure such tyranny in this day and age. But there is an incipient groundswell of forces who consider it time to call on him to take the proper thing to do: resign!

How To Deal With The Problem Of Problematic Persons

BIMBO CABIDOG

Ever came across with problematic persons? How do you deal with their dilemma?

Everyone must have met them: in workplaces, offices, public markets, parks, bus terminals and train rides. They are quite aplenty popping up even at home where folks, tired body and soul, would just rather call it a day and settle down for rest.

The problem with problematic persons is their making a complicated problem out of a simple one. They are the proverbial ones who turn a mere molehill into a mountain, cry wolf when they are only seeing a mouse. They end up not solving the problem but creating a bigger and complex problem.

How can you not deal with them? Well, the better recourse is to leave them on their own. The best reaction is to not react, and just mind your own business. But they make it impossible. They bother, they nag and they pester up to the end of time.

So, deal with them anyway. How to successfully do so is amazingly simple. It takes three steps. They are: Stop, Look and Listen.

A friend of a friend of mine wanted to declare World War III because her child was joked at by playmates for having no father. Well, she begot her son by wedlock and brought him up alone as solo parent. The derision of her son touched a raw nerve. The mom was a ticking bomb ready to explode.

She suspected that her son’s playmates got the story from their parents who talked bad of her, behind her back. She treated the joke as an insult. Soon it waxed into an assault on her person who bore a child without a father. But of course, this was only in her mind.

My friend did not want to have anything to do with it. The issue was just about her friend’s child being joked at by fellow children. It was an innocent affair pure and simple. She wasn’t one to join in reading anything more to it, nor whip up stories out of an overactive imagination.

But the single mom wouldn’t let go. She could not sleep on the wrong. She will not be put down by folks who judge her status. She won’t let hypocrites who think they are clean and decent deny her the right to give her son a normal life, although nobody was actually doing so.

She had no other recourse though but to pester my friend (her friend) no end. She wanted to conscript my friend into her unilateral declaration of war. She could not bring the war to her supposed enemies. She wanted to wage it in my friend’s backyard by talking back even without being heard by the addressees.

The alleged offenders who happen to be just parents of her son’s playmates may even have no inkling at the trespass they were supposed to have committed. The single mom was merely making the problem global. The intransigence was affecting my friend already. So the latter stepped in.

My friend stopped from all other preoccupations to accord the problem time and space. She looked at the problematic person to find what’s really going on. Then she listened to her troubled thoughts.

And her friend just poured out all the psychological and emotional hang-ups that had been weighing her down for a long time. She held on no longer and let everything she had been keeping for years flow like pus from a painful swelling. Suddenly, she was relieved and calmed.

The ally in war that my friend’s friend needed was after all just a true mate to be with her along what she was going through. What she needed was someone she can confide to, who can in turn lend a sympathetic ear and share the heavy load.

What she needed was a friend in the real sense who could take his deeply hidden secret of experiencing hell with genuine empathy and deep understanding.

Many people are going through a lot. Instead of solving their problems, they make these monstrous. It only takes real friends to deal with the problem of problematic persons.

What Causes The Cause-And-Effect Thing?

BIMBO CABIDOG

Life is experienced through change. It reflects things or phenomena, coming and going, in a flux. Each state turns to another. The continuum of change defines existence.

Work defines a human being. The dog barks. That’s what a dog is. Each of those actions and motions manifests change continuously repeated from beginning to end.

The philosopher says that nothing is permanent. Deeds, situations and conditions pass. Being, now, turns to its opposite later. Thesis and antithesis, Hegel declared, lead to synthesis.

The world turns. Evening turns to day. Stormy weather becomes fine next. Turbulence lapses into calm. In the same way that no one remains happy all the time, suffering and oppression go.

The glory and the golden age of empires recede to shameful disgrace. Strong rule crumbles. The castle that towered for an age goes the way of its builders’ fate. On its once proud halls, decay sets in.

The old gives way to new, which gets old afterwards. Ending for one is beginning of another, which also ends later.  But through all these, life advances, finds new horizons, climbs another level.

How short is the time of man! Boast of his dominion and superiority stumbles on the truth that other spans of existence beyond his little dwelling place are in millions of years.

The moonlit and starry night was already there billions of years before the first Homo sapiens appeared 150 millennia ago. They will still be there when the last civilized dude is gone.

But why be obsessed with the matter of time? Yes, men enslave themselves to it. But what if they find out that time has really no existence of its own. One day, the concept of time may not even be remembered.

Nothing is constant except change. But something in every coming and going is not change itself. It drives change, as a physical law converts energy to mass, mass to energy, on and on.

What keeps the sun shining and seating day by day? Or what makes the earth keep on rotating from east to west every 24 hours? Science has all sorts of explanations that men hold to be true and inviolable. But it also may be possible that scientific explanations long held as truth aren’t exactly true.

They base on patterns for one, but patterns are being proven now to be unreliable in making conclusion, simply because they are themselves subject to change. Trust only what is actually happening.

A simplistic way to know the driving force behind change is to find out how it happened. If there is smoke, there must be fire. Change as an effect surely must have come from a cause. But ultimately, it will be asked: what causes the cause-and-effect thing?

Does reality happen because of human preference or cosmic influence? Does it care about moral standpoints, religious perspectives or political persuasions, whatever they are?

Cause-and-effect reality is tricky. But change doesn’t owe to any expectation. It is what it is, not in conformity to someone’s judgment of good or bad. It owes only to the force, and that force is life.

Independence Will Always Be True While Filipinos Care

BIMBO CABIDOG

People still ask: is their country truly independent? Some say no and cite reasons, or ask further leading questions. One of these questions is, “can we indeed be already independent if the vast masses of our people remain poor?”

Others say yes and prove it by political postulates, like the country has its own democratic institutions – congress and the judiciary, and the people exercise the right to vote and choose officials they like to govern.

In case somebody has forgotten, we are celebrating today the 121^st anniversary of Philippine Independence. This means that government has officially decreed June 12, 1898 as the day the nation freed itself from colonial rule.

June 12, more than a century ago, was the day Filipino revolutionaries hoisted the country’s flag at the balcony of the Aguinaldo mansion in Kawit, Cavite and declared independence from Spain.

Of course, they were still in the midst of armed struggle to overthrow Spanish rule and complete victory was not at hand. But this was the winding moment of national conversion and the tribes and regions standing under a flag as one people.

The historical fact is important to clarify some erroneous misconception. The figure 121 is not the number of years the country has become independent. It is the number of years since Filipinos first asserted independence from foreign rule, officially and formally.

So, if we are now indeed independent or not doesn’t matter. We are not celebrating the period of time the country has become independent. We are marking the time the Filipino people resolutely asserted nationhood in revolutionary struggle.

Independence is not a mere label or political status. It is a collective stand and assertion of the people at a certain stage of their historical social development. It was the announcement to the whole world by our freedom fighters that henceforth they hold their right to self-determination inviolable and thus entertain no more colonial dictates.

In 1898, as provincial uprisings surged everywhere in the islands, the Filipino people have risen to a course that was irreversible. They have given birth to a nation by a collective will that no foreign power could anymore crush. Nationhood and identity were etched in blood by unity and struggle.

Yes, the American imperialists would later come to subjugate us. But the aggressors were deluding themselves to think they could do so. The Filipino nation was already beyond killing, even if the well-trained and better armed US forces decimated hundreds of thousands of resisting natives.

The Aguinaldo-led government succumbed in defeat to the imperialists. Noted for vacillation and betrayal, it foolishly conceded to yield inch by strategic inch of foothold to the foreign interventionists who faked alliance, but actually wanted to annex the islands to their sphere of global expansion.

As revolutionary courage gave way to treasonous cowardice, the newly built republic ended under the bootheels of the imperialist aggressor, and for the next fifty years, the country heeded foreign tutelage and dictates. It forfeited a future of its own.

Subtract the 46 years under US colonial rule, when even the mere mention of the word independence by Filipinos would be prohibited as a crime of sedition. Subtract also the post-war years of a fledgling republic, when continuing political and economic interference by the Americans easily annulled their supposed granting of independence in 1946. How many years can we yet count as really independent?

When we assess the national experience in the years of purported self-determination and government of our own, has independence ever been a reality? There are cases and instances to prove it hasn’t – the continuing Filipino diaspora, economic dependence, debt slavery, and diminution of sovereignty by consent to the hegemonic intrusions of powers like China which is devouring the West Philippine Sea, and the United States which still bases military forces and assets here.

But what do Filipinos today really care? As long as there are folks calling themselves Filipino who still stand and assert for country, the trueness of independence will never be erased by any circumstance. Fear when the masses no longer care.

Groups to convene assembly for multi-sectoral action on poverty

Dagami, Leyte – Groups from three municipalities in Leyte will be meeting this February to discuss the present situation and the major social, political, economic, and environmental problems besetting their localities.

The assembly seeks to unite concerned sectors on the goals to advance over the current period and the means to achieve these goals. It is also intended to chart an initial multi-sectoral program of action especially on poverty and the backwardness or stagnation of local economies.

Scheduled to be held on February 27, at Dagami town proper, the said affair will be attended by small farmers, rural wage-earners, womenfolk, micro-entrepreneurs and motorcycle drivers or operators from select barangays in the municipalities of Tabon-Tabon, Pastrana and Dagami, in the province of Leyte.

The lead convenor of the event is the Institute for Local Innovation and Approach in Development (ILIAD), a non-government organization helping indigent households undertake enterprise for livelihood through self-help initiative, while also engaging in technical and management cooperation with local communities to advance sustainable development.

The activity banners the theme Pagkaurosa ug Paggios Para Katalwasan (Unity and Action for Salvation), in the face of deeply felt hardships hitting folks with low incomes or no viable income at all, “marginalized more than ever by recent economic trends,” ILIAD said.

“The assembly will be an occasion to take stock of what the masses have gotten all these years,” ILIAD executive director Bimbo Cabidog explained. “For decades, they have looked up to politicians and officials in high echelons of government, but got nothing that would genuinely change their lot!”

“The people have continued to miss doing what they themselves must do,” Mr. Cabidog said, adding: “During elections for instance, they are riveted to the intramurals and antics in the political arena, but does their situation improve after? The answer is no, as experience has always told.”

“Ending up empty-handed, and with hardships only getting worse, the people must now take initiative, make their own decision and wage their own actions,” Cabidog further said. “No one else will act to end poverty than the poor themselves, no other time is better to do so than the present, for actually this has been long overdue.”

The February 27 meet will be a “carpe-diem moment” for folks in the barangays to unite, move into action and advance their very own social, political, economic and environmental agenda, the event’s spearhead, ILIAD, stated.

Among the targeted development milestones for discussion and unity are poverty reduction, community-based economic growth and environmental sustainability.

On Poverty Reduction Topping the Socio-Political Agenda Once Again

Nearly two decades ago, world leaders met at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City to define anew the international body’s role at the turn of the 21st century. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in history as of 2000.

How important was the gathering? The advent of the new millennium presented “a unique and symbolically compelling moment to articulate and affirm an animating vision for the United Nations,” a UN General Assembly resolution stated.

The Millennium Summit lasted for three days from September 6 to 8, 2000. At the end, it ratified the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which contained the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Commonly referred to as the UNMDGs, the vision hailed eight human development milestones which forged for the first time consensus among nations on more fundamental social reforms.

First of the eight goals is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. With 36 percent of the global population then reportedly earning less than $1.90 a day, poverty stood out primarily among the major global concerns during the crossover to the third millennium.

The other goals were: (2) Universal Primary Education, (3) Gender Equality and Women Empowerment, (4) Reduced Child Mortality, (5) Improved Maternal Health Care, (6) Combatting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, (7) Environmental Sustainability, and (8) Global Partnership for Development.

The cut-off year for substantially meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals was year 2015. But three years since, intense deprivations among the masses remain pervasive in Sub-Saharan Africa and the developing countries of South and East Asia. The concerns addressed by the UNMDGs, especially that of extreme poverty and hunger, promise not to be resolved in any immediate future.

Over the years after the conclusion of World War II, indigence of the masses would be a perpetual reality in the Philippines, which for a long time, especially during the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos, was tagged by economic analysts as “the basket case” of Asia. One of the expectations in the broad struggle to end his regime was the alleviation of severe poverty around the country.

The Marcos dictatorship was ousted by a brief civilian uprising called People Power revolution in 1986. In the transition to the full restoration of liberal democratic rule, President Cory Aquino declared war against poverty. The move may not have been backed up by a promise of meaningful change in the prevailing social structure, but it put the issue of the Impoverishment of millions of Filipinos on top of the national agenda.

The initiative prevailed over the years as one of the country’s top priorities. It would not be overridden by other concerns, no matter how presumably most pressing. The issue of poverty gained prominence again in the strategies for development of the administrations of Fidel V. Ramos and Benigno S. Aquino III, which made inclusive growth a standard criterion.

Inclusive growth meant that the bottom 40 percent of the population should not be left behind in the economic rise of society, but should also be able to equitably partake in its fruits.

Mass poverty is a complex social ill that may not simply be cured by creating jobs, fostering yearly high growth rate in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), doling out capital for livelihood generation some going to naught anyway, or transferring cash to the poor. It is a malaise that stems from social injustice and economic exploitation borne out by predatory practices in production and markets.

And the reality of poverty shows manifold dimensions, like lack of education, subhuman shelter, disenfranchisement, hunger, etc. demanding each one’s distinct treatment.

There should be no illusion hence of eradicating poverty under a social order still marshaled by classes and forces whose compelling interest is to preserve the political-economic system that perpetuates misery. Those are the oligarchs of finance, the trading tycoons, big foreign investors, their domestic business counterparts, their landlord cohorts, the traditionally moneyed elite, and political dynasties.

In the same breadth, there shouldn’t be any illusion either on the dominantly rich 20 of international community dealing decisively with the stark inequality that portrays poverty in the sharpest contrast, that is: the wealthiest of the globe (so few they are said to fit in a single bus) controlling one half of its income and resources, while the rest of the earth in their teeming billions have to make do with the other half.

Only deep-going and comprehensive social change can make poverty a thing of the past. But to be resigned about it and altogether forget the vast masses who continue to suffer acute ill-being are not an option. Whether or not the government can do anything about it, the eradication/reduction of poverty should be pushed to the top of the social agenda. It should be constantly highlighted as a goal this millennium has yet to accomplish both on the domestic and global spheres.

There has been a tendency, particularly among politicians who continually fail in the promise to improve the lives of the poor, to slip the issue under the rug. They lack empathy, much more eagerness, in helping to solve it. For many of them, planning and implementing anti-poverty initiatives only gets in the way of everyone’s favorite modus operandi of doing projects to siphon money from the public coffers to their pockets. The attitude that has inured among them is to shun anti-poverty nonsense.

On the other hand, the past three years saw the war against poverty side-lined by the concentration of government action and resources on the overarching war on drugs of President Rodrigo Duterte. In fact, observers deplored that with the extrajudicial killings of lowly folks in slums and misery-laden fringes of urban centers, the presumptuous drive to curve narcotics and criminality has redounded to a simple massacre of the poor.

The current period offers an auspicious time to put once more the issue of mass poverty on top of the social agenda. The nation is conducting its constitutionally mandated midterm elections, and politicos out there who desire for lucrative seats in government are wooing again voters with sweet promises of the greater good. Placing the certified global concern and festering local reality squarely on the table, have them answer: what are they going to do with the pervading problem of poverty, and is dealing with it important to them?

By voicing out the issue of poverty and what to be done to address it, the private sector most especially civil society pushes a platform for the politics of genuine change. Such politics of genuine change is opposed to the mere change of political faces, names and personalities in the usual merry-go-round of choosing from the same members of the rich elite and family dynasties who shall hold power and corner economic spoils for the next three years. The latter is the politics of elections Philippine style.

One is gone forever, another embedded in eternity

BIMBO CABIDOG

  Writing has its share of doubts and hesitation vacillation can stop it on its tracks. But like a bug, it keeps disturbing, gnawing to hold the pen. It itches to etch on the blank page. It urges to start drawing lines, and forming them into words. Soon, the blank page is filled. Writers cannot help but write all the time. It is a mode of existence hard to buck.

To write is to try to reflect what’s out there, what are going on, rhyme and reason, often unable to give birth to anything. The business-oriented pragmatists say, engage in it then you kill time. They don’t have that luxury. It makes you feel guilty to write, because you tend to agree that time is too expensive a commodity to spend just languishing on the unsaid word.

Peter Drucker teaches that time is the limiting factor. So, should you indulge on the pen? Trying to scribble a sentence, but not succeeding, how much hours in my youth I saw seemingly going to nothing. I was so bad at it that getting to say something coherently via the written word took great pains. Hopeless, helpless and going nowhere, as the clock ticked and sweat moistened my hands and forehead, I would just doze. And thought froze.

But still young to be under my parents’ care, worry or tension was out. I lived for the present. I did not have to finish something or work at something on time. My stint with the here and now was timeless. I did not pay attention to the idea, but presumably wasting time on fruitless writing was priceless, simply because it was not concerned with any monetary equivalent. To do so just for the love of doing so was happy hour.

The labor or play somehow paid off. Now, I can finish composing a sentence, or most effectively say something even without composing a sentence. I can string thoughts into an article and be confident enough to see it on newsprint. There is that high sense of achievement reading my piece on a newspaper’s page. It has also given me confidence to write.

Passion fuels the craft with a continuous surge of energy. For writing is not just about expression, but feeling. The writer does not just tell what’s happening. He/she plumb the depth of the human experience. What is being written engages him/her as if he/she is part of it, living the drama, lending an invaluable perspective.

Telling as the writer does plugs into a connection. In the same manner that an electrical outlet does, it immediately conducts volts of trembling current to the soul. It strikes a sensitive spot there, like plucking the chords of a guitar and producing melody. Many of those harmonious chords in varying voices, tones and sounds produce the music of a symphony orchestra – the piece the writer finally achieves on his/her readers. Writing, thus, does not only need skill, but skill smelted into golden  prose or poetry by talent.

But if as an art a piece of writing is timeless, it still cannot afford to lose relevance. It must take up stuff that the people go through in their daily lives in real time. A good read does not confine itself to swooning about the birds and the bees, or how lovable a piece of eternity is, like a cascading waterfall down a moss-covered limestone cliff in a deep forest. It disturbs the stagnancy of matter and the inertia of force by putting each back into the current of time.

I have attempted at great work self-consciously striving to infuse drama and oratory to what is thought as an otherwise boring narrative. I did not begin with a humble opening. I assaulted the blank paper at once with clichés and stereotypes that have had their day, but already wore out a past glory. This set me into heaping the stint with self-praise and vainglory. It becomes an exercise in storytelling made discordant by high-falutin and presumptuous language.

Did I say things hard to get a handle on? Or did I make them clear enough, like a cool spring under a sweltering day? In the end, what matters is not that I simply love writing, but that people love what I write. What matters is that I connected the words, like electric pulses, into the hearts of those who care to read it, and that the message nested in their head to give birth to countless offspring. For every event that breaks, every reality that shows, one aspect leaves to be gone forever. But still, another remains, stuck in the bulletin board of eternity. 

Footloose In My Native Land

BIMBO CABIDOG

Travel can be a gift. It is now being given to me by the Almighty. After all, He has carved destinations worthy to be goals of a lifetime.

I am thankful to be gifted with means to embark on those choice trips along the various lanes and byways crisscrossing my native land. Though quite late at my age, I am raring to explore its interesting sites, or wherever wanderlust takes me.

My journey kicks off on January 18 this year with a passenger-van commute to Ormoc, where I will saunter to some last-minute buys at the mall, and an abbreviated sight-seeing around the city’s core, after which I will check in for overnight stay at a hotel.

Ormoc harbour, west of the island of Leyte, is a busy concourse and gateway to the rest of the Visayas. I’ve been to the city many times before. It is just more than a hundred kilometers away from my hometown. Every visit to it would be a rediscovery of a place that never ceases to excite.

Early next morning, I will be taking a fast ferry to Cebu. Alighting at the port of call, I must immediately transfer to Mactan airport to catch an afternoon flight to Kalibo, Aklan. The town is the scene of the historic Ati Atihan Festival this time of the year. I am billeted for a two-night stay at a port town nearby for the bash.

Why Kalibo for starter? I cannot wait for more years to be added to my age (if they are still actually available) to revel in an 800-year old tradition. Filipinos somehow trace some strains in their genetic line to the Atis who started the joyous revelry in the 13th century.

Post-festivities, next hop is Caticlan to take a boat to Boracay. The resort sojourn over a couple of days is my first and maybe last time to be here. I have read quite a wealth of travel literature on the beach haven for tourists with finely grounded white sands and azure blue offshore waters.

My eye-witness affirmation or denial of the accolades heaped on the adventure and leisure destination of Boracay concludes the first leg of a journey that has yet to take me to more island gems in Western and Central Visayas, from Panay to Negros, Siquijor, Cebu and Bohol, onto sorties to treasured nooks up north in Luzon, followed by excursions back south to the scenic ecological frontiers of Palawan.

Right now, I am too awed to say a lot on this providence that certainly no other than God can bestow. I shall use the gift to be my way of seeing in full splendor the magnificent works that He has done. I take it as a pilgrimage over roads least and most traveled, to pay homage to Him sitting at the throne over all of creation. Glory be to the Father.

I know the journey is physically challenging. That only makes me more daring. The amount of energy, reserves of stamina, brain juices and vigour to spend may be forbidding, especially to a sexagenarian like me. But resolve and sheer will may just see me through.

Added to the feat of going places, finding accommodations for stay, and getting to settle in some modicum of comfort is the imperative of justifiably recording or journalizing almost every bit of the experience. But with the Force up there with me all the way, there is probably nothing I can’t afford.

Minus yet the gold medal at the finish line (of course I don’t know what sort awaits), measuring up to the requirements of the tour marathon – materially, physically and mentally, is for me already a lifetime achievement. I offer any triumph here and there as testimony to God’s greatness, even as the canvass of breath-taking natural wonders, and awesome human-cultural narratives expected to unfold down the road speak for themselves. They hail the Great One.

For God and country, I am venturing into the rediscovery of a homeland that countless generations of people with my human features have come to dwell on, live on and die on over millennia. I shall look anew at the priceless possessions of an archipelago to which national hero Dr. Jose Rizal attached the tagline “Pearl of the orient Seas.”

Truly, its allure renews and renews year after year. Its colorful vistas, island to island, do not fade. It is worth dying for. It is worthier living for. And it is worthiest traveling for, to see even for the hundredth time, every instance in a different light.

Is it the fault of my country to be so captivating to entice the foreigner to grab it? My excursions all over the Philippine Archipelago will find answers in the stories of folks of different ethno-linguistic affiliations. One reason may be that our ancestors dating back to the era of western colonial expansion were so unmindfully generous they did not mind sharing their riches. They did not care to be formidably fortified to shut out intruders, or dangerously armed to drive away aggressors.

For what did they actually have in that critical age of annexations by colonizers? They had jars, artistic bamboo huts, dugout kayaks, gold ornaments, pearls, pottery, metal works, grains and a hospitable nature that invited strangers to their food – notwithstanding if those have evil intents. They did not have massive fortifications, towers to watch the sea, bastions to hurl powerful counterattacks, canons, and the latest in military strategy.

That state of unpreparedness to fight out any invaders that loom on their shores – not yet the land’s allure, is perhaps the one that temptingly gave them away to the alien predators’ captivity: 350 years of monastery, 8 years of Hollywood, as a writer would put it.

Foreign conquest only proved the country to be a land of beautiful people, easy to make friends, fine and safe to be with. Hence, the precious gems are not only to be found in its 7,641 islands and islets. They are also in the gentle ways and warmth of local folks, not letting go of an enviable culture of embracing despite harsh outcomes, punishing trials and tribulations.

Throughout my younger years, I have been engrossed in narrow struggles to take note of them. Now is the time to underscore such traits in a journal of my wanderings that I vow to pen.

From my home province’s stretch of the Maharlika Highway in Leyte, I shall soon hit the road that detours to the cross-country corridor of Tacloban and Ormoc. There, ocean cruise and air flight will whisk me to the marvelous sea-and-land concertos of the Visayas. I will dip into my human roots that trace to the squat dark-skinned aborigines who crossed the land bridges of the geologic ice age from the Asian mainland to the southeast bulge of the continent, where they would remain when rising seas cut it off.

Then I go back to starting point to follow the road lacing northward into the rugged hills and shorelines of Samar, across the strait further north to the tiresome stretches of the Pan-Philippine road network throughout the Bicol Peninsula, up to the branching links of the Central Plain, the perilous coiling passes of the Sierra Madre range to Isabela and Cagayan, the dizzying Kennon Road climb to Baguio, out to the mountain-hewn Halsema Highway along the steppes of the Cordillera, the chilly heights of Sagada, and the monumental rice terraces of the Ifugaos in the sights of Bontoc and Banawe.

Stopping at the doorsteps of Kalinga along the Chico River, I will retrace down to the northwest strip of the Ilocoses, the coastal skirts of La Union and Pangasinan, and the Hundred Islands. The long and winding Luzon leg cuts off, where I fly southward to Palawan.

The following leg is crowned by a meaningful trip to the lately paved dirt roads of the Kris-shaped island that link the southern anthropological Tabon Caves, the picturesque entry at Sabang to the massive underground river – cited in 2011 as the Seventh Wonder of the World, the quaint laid-back city of Puerto Princesa, Honda Bay, the still lagoons of Coron, Nido and the Bacuit Peninsula.

Hereon the long journey nears its end. Though Palawan crowns it, last is yet the anticlimactic extension to the Mindanao leg. God willing, I pray that my strength doesn’t leave me yet up to here. One reason why I do this is to know my country more, and help my fellow countrymen know it more, for us to love it more.