The first story of Christmas was the story of Jesus’ parents who arrived at Bethlehem from a long trip and went from house to house to find a bed so that they can sleep from a long trek. They could only find a haystack in a farm for a bed; but it was from such a lowly, humble place that the story of hope, faith and love began.
Nothing expresses more succinctly the spirit of Christmas than a song or a poem that comes like a song. We very well know how the Christmas message is embodied in the legend of Christ’s nativity in Bethlehem. It was told, angels sang on high the joyful tidings, proclaiming the Glory of God — Gloria in Excelsis Deo — and trumpeting the message of peace and goodwill to earth’s humankind.
There’s no fiesta like Christmas holidays.
Yesterday, a group of three young Lumad mothers and four very young children including a one-year-old baby came to the house to ask for pinaskohan (Christmas presents). No sooner had they announced their purpose in coming than I ushered them into the courtyard of my house and bade them settle on the benches and table that used to be utility components of our defunct bakeshop.
One of the condemnable things during the December 9 bus bombing in Maramag, Bukidnon was that dozens of students from high school and college were not spared from the incident.
One recalls a suspected CIA Filipino Jesuit priest who was instrumental in the Indonesian student-youths’ mobilization and participation in the coup d’etat that toppled President Sukarno of Indonesia some decades back.
In face of the pervasive injurious effects of the prevailing culture to the over-all social life of our people, there is an urgent need for a counter-consciousness to supplant it. This is a call of the first order and necessitates a propaganda movement that shall mobilize the youths in their greatest number. It shall be of a vigor and magnitude that can surpass the Second Propaganda Movement of the 1960s to the70s.
It is an economic malady, as much as it afflicts the political and cultural superstructure of society.
An abridged English version of a Talk I delivered at a Youth Forum in UP-Mindanao last November 21, 2014
Five years after the massacre of 58 men and women including 32 journalists in Ampatuan town in Maguindanao, justice remains elusive and impunity still reigns.
