Puppetry and Poverty are 2Ps that insure the futility and failure of President Noynoy’s program of 4Ps. How can he proclaim moral rectitude and vouch for matuwid na daan and emancipate the people from poverty with his nauseous puppetry to American imperialism? Puppetry begets graft and corruption. Poverty begets criminality. Graft and corruption forge partnership with criminality for the flourish of bureaucrat capitalism.
He has reneged on his pledges and his acts have all floundered in utter failure. One would ask Why?
Digging up on old issues of Gimbao (newsletter publication of the defunct DEMS or Development Education Media Services Inc.) I came upon this article by Davao scholar and historian Macario D. Tiu, written 19 years ago. The essay entitled “Culture of Defeat”. strikes me as still throbbing with bloody reality and still very relevant to the present-day crisis in Philippine society. And so I decided to have it reprinted in full here -
I will not tell you about the ordeal we suffered, but I will tell you about how that did not stop me.
Ironically, I must leave what I know as home for what I know as a battlefield: from Mindanao to Manila. Strange, how years before, my paradigm was in a complete reverse, patterned to common myths of vain consequence. And now, my permanent home will not be the mapped streets and affixed buildings of the known city that I head toward, but the roving mountains and seas, unmarked except by restless feet that follow stars and struggles. Soon enough, I shall be called back home.