If you cock your head at a certain angle, they sound just like the incessant buzz of cicadas, and if you close your eyes you could almost imagine that you were on the lower Pantaron on that balmy Friday evening with just the right amount of humidity and drizzle.
Verily, the lowland Filipinos have only replaced the foreign colonizers in colonizing the racial and blood brothers and sisters—the Lumads in the countryside.
The Makabayan Coalition is one with the nation in expressing its deep sorrow and sense of loss at the death of Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, editor in chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and indefatigable defender of press freedom and democracy.
Earlier last week, while most of us are into the slapping fiasco between presidential candidates Mar Roxas and Rody Duterte, the peasants in Compostela Valley are fighting for their land, fighting for their lives.
Around a long-neck bottle of Emperador we gathered and happily exchanged holiday greetings and peered on each other’s radiant faces and exhibited our dirty-white teeth to one another and hummed or sang the jingle bells and silver bells the way we wanted our uneasy joy to manifest on this bright evening twodays before Christmas Day.