A Day in the Life...

When I was in highschool, Michael Petralba, an old neighborhood friend from Carmen Street but who is now residing in Los Angeles, once spoke to me in a very animated fashion how the Philippines could one day become the richest country in the world. As a prelude, Michael said to me that his father had some vital information why a number of foreigners were in the country for a very secret purpose. I wondered loudly to him how secret it was and asked him if he could actually let me know some of the “secret’. He then informed me without hesitation that the foreigners were here mainly to study and find out ways on how to extract deuterium from the Philippine seas. I asked how come his father knew about all those stuff and what “deuterium” was in the first place. With gasping breath, and with gleaming pride for that matter, Michael told me as a matter of fact that his father was a war veteran and because of this, he had American contacts in the CIA. The CIA thing sounded preposterous to ...

I do not mean re-engineering or even re-structuring . Maybe all we need is merely to invigorate the government system in order for it to achieve  the  maximum efficiency that is expected  of  it. We have tried such modes  of  re-invention as re-engineering and re-structuring, at great cost in time and money, and yet improvements have not been substantial or palpable. The  public  continues to languish in long queues every time a license or a passport is needed. Bribes are ever pernicious, and even more open today, like it is not anymore a secret that should be tucked inside the pocket or a key thrown into  the  deepest ocean. Sadly today, the  public continues to encounter lazy faces of  public  servants seemingly tired of their day job and daydreaming  of  life in beaches almost all day long. At the slightest error, the public who is merely seeking public service get squirmed at by those who are ...

More than a hundred years ago, in Bagumbayan, shots rang out in the western sky and a man fell down without being able to face his assassins. He stumbled to the ground without being able to turn a complete three hundred sixty twist that he had labored to create when the word “Fuego!!!” rattled and hummed into the wind.  What courage does a man has to be able to muster enough resolve in order to face the unthinkable in the very instance of death. I have not known any man other than Jose Rizal, who could retain such composure, writing even what could be the greatest farewell ever written when he inscribed within the dim stonewalls put on him, a paean to this Motherland, a last goodbye. ….Adios patria adorada….Goodbye, my dear Motherland….  Jose Rizal is the man we see as an icon test, the standards we seek in order to size up our character. He has the courage that every Filipino needs in these times of the greatest trial to our nation’s character to rise above these s...

There were many talks about the middle class before ---who are they and where are they found? In the Philippine settings, identifying this sector of our society is never an easy task for this idiom, which has found its root in western economic theories, does not easily apply to our own principalities. Who are the members of our middle class? Where are they? How can we identify them? Generally, the determining factor in ascertaining the middle level of our society is primarily the earning capacity of a certain group of people and secondarily their social mindset. In a society like us, where for many centuries we were in virtual serfdom, we are mainly a nation of the rich on one side and the rest of the poor in the other. There is nothing much in between. We had at many times in the past a classless society. We must only remember that even as we speak and while we kept again and again to break away from this stranglehold of unfair distribution of wealth in our nation, we have not...