Into the Black

After more than two years of the pandemic, our town was finally able to properly celebrate it’s annual fiesta last January. And perhaps to make up for the two years that our town was bereft of its most anticipated annual week-long celebration due to the dreaded coronavirus, the municipal government pulled the necessary strings to bring---tadahh—Ely Buendia to our town. For those who do not know, Buendia was the chief songwriter and frontman of the seminal 90’s Filipino band, the Eraserheads. To the generation who grew up during the 90’s, and were therefore able to witness the Heads’ rise and eventual demise in real time, watching Buendia perform live onstage was like meeting one of the apostles. I belong to that generation. And so braving the cold night and the traffic, and defying the doctor’s advice that I should always get a decent amount of sleep, I, with my wife in tow, put off watching The Hunt on Netflix (we were in the movie’s climax, by the way), and rushed to the show’s ven...

Filipinos have always been known for placing a high premium on education. One does not need to be an anthropologist to know that. If one only bothers to cast a cursory glance at the facade of his neighbors' houses, one would instantly notice a common sight: a metal or wooden plate indicating that a son or daughter has made the grade by becoming a physician, an attorney-at-law, or an engineer. The Filipino attitude towards education can also be gleaned from the high respect accorded to people with long strings of suffixes attached to their names (MA, Ed.D., Ph.D, etc.). We believe that the achievements embodied in those suffixes make their owners a cut above other mortals. That is why, in addressing them in correspondences, or in introducing them during formal functions, omission of those suffixes is considered a horrible mistake.   This "fetish" for education or its trappings, however, is quite understandable. In a country where poverty is rampant, and manual labor is loo...

The subjective is very real. Reality is not only what exists “out there”, it is also what exists “in here”. This truth explains why human beings differ from one another. And unless we grasp this truth,  we will never learn to respect the feelings, beliefs, opinions, and dreams–the individuality of every person. For instance, an object, person, or a scene, evokes a certain emotion in you, while to other people, the same object, person, or scene does not mean anything other than that it is an objective existence. It’s all in your head but as  Albus Dumbledore  said, “why on earth should it mean that it is not real?” Below is poem about how an otherwise meaningless scene evokes a certain emotion in the speaker in the poem. Please read and tell me what you think about it. I promise, I will respect your opinion because I know that it is as real as mine. Silhouette   it was only her shrinking form blocking the faint glimmer of a fluorescent bulb ahea...

Having experienced teaching in several public schools, I have memories of former colleagues letting slip that they were integrating religion-based morality into their lessons. For instance, one of them once recounted to me how she explained to her students the evil of homosexuality in her Values Education class one afternoon. Citing Biblical passages, she told them that God had an aversion to homosexuals. Apparently, her premise was that the Bible was the word of God, and as such, was as irrefutable an evidence as one could ever wish to anchor her assertion on. I had half a mind to ask her what made her so sure that the Bible was the word of God—and not the hundreds of other books contending for the title—but the fear of offending her got the better of me. At any rate, I thought that engaging in a debate on religion was always a tricky affair, and I did not want to get myself entangled in one if I could help it. In retrospect, however, I realized that setting aside theological iss...

For a very long time, history education has been thought of as consisting solely of the teaching of substantive knowledge — facts, concepts, or generalizations that have to do with past events. Students have been taught, for instance, when and where the Spanish colonization of the Philippines began, what colonization means, or how the Spaniards conquered the Philippines. It cannot be denied that knowledge of this type is important for students to acquire. However, the view that history education is nothing more than a repository of this type of knowledge, has been the object of criticisms from social educators over the past two decades. These social educators pointed out that a history education that concerns itself exclusively with teaching substantive content is dismissible as a lightweight subject. For under such education, students’ progress in history education would mean only their accumulation of information about past events, and their ability to regurgitate this informati...

One of the enduring debates in the history of philosophy is that which concerns the question of human freedom. This debate has produced two camps representing two seemingly diametrically opposed views about freedom: the Marxists and the existentialists. Marxists maintain that the latitude within which human freedom may operate at any given time is determined by the existing social configuration, which, in turn, is shaped by historical circumstances that unfold in accordance with the general directions in which history is moving, but which appear as unconnected accidents. Freedom is only an illusion because in the exercise of their power to choose, humans may at best only react to the various stimuli produced by social forces, which are beyond their individual control.  In other words, they are only playing out the roles which have been written by history for them, but which seem like accidents to their unsophisticated eyes. Existentialists, on the other hand, would argue tha...

The principle of non-interference fulfilled a very important function early in the ASEAN’s existence. It helped preserve the unity within the organization despite the volatile diplomatic relations among its members. For instance, at around the time of the Association’s formation, Indonesia and the Philippines had each raised territorial claims over some of the territories of the then nascent Malaysia (Katanyu, 2003). Indonesia even went so far as to institute a policy of  confrontasi  against the fledgling nation, and this would have easily escalated into a violent confrontation. Fortunately, this scenario was averted due in part to the principle of non-interference, which counseled ASEAN nations to respect the sovereignty of fellow ASEAN members. Had the principle not been in place in the early decades of the Association’s existence, the ASEAN would have long met the fate of its predecessors, e.g. ASA and MAPHILINDO. Aside from abating the tensions resulting from territori...