Reina Mae and baby River’s story shows us otherwise. For people with no big names and for activists, human rights are never served on a silver platter. These should always be asserted against the establishment and must be defended for recognition, respect, and protection.
Teachers are demanded to grade objectively. Students are commanded to deliver. And while this seems to be the most efficient way to identify who “passes” and who “fails”, it disregards the human aspect of education. In fact, it is this obsession with efficiency and production that reveals how misplaced the priority of our education system is.
Every year in October, anesthesiologists celebrate or commemorate Anesthesia Week. I will write this time about the anesthesiologist as victims and victors. My column got its inspiration from Roger Water’s (or Pink Floyd’s) song “Comfortably Numb.”
In an agricultural country like ours, the biggest budget must be allotted to the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agrarian Reform. Right now, for every P100 budget, only P2.00 is allotted for agriculture and production. For every P1.00 budget for agriculture, there is P4.00 for the police and military.
It is supremely dissonant that, on what is supposedly Indigenous Peoples’ Month in the Philippines, the local police of the province of Kalinga proposes to demolish the monument to three historical figures to the Indigenous struggles of the Cordillera region.