Prints and Traces

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 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.