Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 7:

These Are The Fundamental Beliefs That Define Our Lifestyle

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Once I was asked by the university to share with the faculty some points about simplicity of lifestyle, I took the occasion to sit down with my wife and articulate the fundamental beliefs we live by. Here I share with you the fundamental beliefs that shape our lifestyle:

1) We believe that there is a being of great Love in the world who governs our existence. This is a fundamental certainty that is grounded on existential experience for us. This just means that we have felt this Love’s presence and cannot but respond to it.
2) This great Love calls us all to share in their act of love for all being.
3) The great suffering in the world caused by human beings is painful for this great Love to see. And if we do participate in their Love, we cannot live without orienting our lives toward the alleviation of this suffering.
4) The task of serving the suffering and the poor is not an incidental task but the very central task of our lives.
5) There are many ways to serve the suffering in every arena of our lives. But our work only becomes an act of service when it is centered on serving the other and not our egos or our need to be needed or our reputations.
6) A life centered on service is the only path to finding yourself and to finding your potential as a person. It is the only way because a life lived only for the self keeps you from recognizing the call of love that calls you to your potential as a person.
7) Our lifestyles—that is the way we consume, entertain ourselves, engage in leisure, and work, or the way we maintain ourselves in existence—must not be exploitative. Although we have a right to maintain ourselves in existence, as workers building the kingdom, we have no right in causing the greater suffering of others in these acts.
8) We must in fact try and build up the lives of others in our acts of self-maintenance. This is perhaps what they refer to today as solidarity economics. Examples of this are acts that affirm the right of the marginalized and deserving to make a living: buying from neighborhood informal sellers rather than big stores, actively supporting alternative or non-mainstream artists, or choosing to pay a just wage for the services of those who help us.
9) We must not focus our lives too much on acquisition, consumption, and luxury for the sustaining of such desires often requires us to engage in the accumulation of wealth which in our world cannot be done without others paying for it. I believe the realities of global warming and worldwide poverty are clear proofs of this. Sadly, those who pay the sins of our excesses are always those who did not even choose to live or desire to live according to these excesses.
10) We are required by Love to make sacrifices in big and small ways for the marginalized—on the level of structural change and on the level of small acts of deliberate affirmation and support. Thus, we are called to live simpler lives or even sacrifice some or much of our own income to empower the disempowered.
11) Ultimately, we are all called to take part in realizing the revolutionary structural changes that will ensure that the suffering of others is ended. I use revolutionary here in the Christian and Marxian but not Marxist sense. The Christian sense still demands the changing of social structures but demands a transformation of self in love and justice.

Of course we don’t live this way of life perfectly, but we try to live it as much as possible. It’s not always easy. It means resisting a consumeristic lifestyle. That for us is the hardest aspect to accomplish because we are in a sense programmed to find consolation for our hard work or for our difficulties in buying things. We also try to find affirmation for our value or self-worth by what we own. So it’s sometimes hard to resist being consumers or even losing sight of our values in trying to engage in activities that will make us earn better in order to live more luxuriously. But we try to live according to our convictions even in simple ways like engaging our neighborhood service sector and paying them more than exploitative wages. We don’t ask for discounts from poor vendors. We buy our supplies from local, informal sector merchants even if it costs more. We consciously buy Filipino as much as possible. We take vacations only in the Philippines. And we have committed to professions that will pay us less than we could potentially earn in order to focus on service.

We have also chosen to raise our children ourselves as much as our professions will allow. In this way I believe we can raise persons of love and service who will themselves grow up to serve. Concretely, this means we have no stay-in yaya. In this way we have raised a 17-year old who I am proud to say is at least aware of the suffering of others and hopes to serve them through her writing. Now we are still raising a 4 year old and I must say it still requires great sacrifice on our part. I find it particularly important to raise my son so that he will grow up to understand how fathers themselves need to be persons of service in very concrete ways. He must understand that men must know how to cook, clean the house, and serve the people around them in order to break the sad tradition of spoiled, useless boys in our country.

On a personal note, it is difficult to continue this lifestyle without any structural support. It is hard to be a just consumer when most businesses are structured unjustly. It is hard to raise one’s own child when there are no day care centers in your work place and when you can be left out of so many things because you did not choose to prioritize your career over your fundamental responsibilities.

Sometimes it’s painful to see the outcome of your own choices. Sometimes it hurts to see others advance in the world who have chosen to live otherwise. It is a little more poignant now as sometimes I watch the world proceed without me as I chase a little boy around our little world. Clearly the successes that the world recognizes are not always for those of us who have chosen to live in service, except perhaps for a few happy exceptions. But the rewards of a life justly lived are found in the living of it. For living such a life keeps us closer to our truth, to our potential as creative human beings, and to the Love that bears us in their heart so that we remain focused on what is most important and find ourselves in the end made whole.

van Gogh and the Real Thing

by Michael G. Aurelio

As with many passionate souls,
the moment had come when his faith in life was faltering.
—Albert Camus, Notebooks

The turning point in the Ridley Scott film A Good Year finds the protagonist Max Skinner (Russell Crowe), a successful trader who just inherited from his deceased uncle the vineyard he grew up in, given two choices by his boss: “money or your life.” He had just come back from his unplanned and poignant visit to his uncle’s vineyard in Provence, France to arrange its sale. In his short stay there, however, he was also able to revisit his youthful years and remember the happiness he once had and now could no longer afford.

To be on a “holiday,” unfortunately, is unthinkable in the unforgiving world of trading. Wanting to know what he was committed to and where his heart lies, the owner of the firm, the no-nonsense German Sir Nigel, asks Max to decide on his own fate. Either he leaves with a discharge settlement “with a lot of zeros,” or stay and accept an offer for a full partnership.

Before their short, straightforward dialogue, Max had noticed, among other pieces of art, a beautiful painting showcased on the wall. It was Van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star. He inquires about the work of art, and his boss says that the one on the wall was a 200 grand copy—but the original, he nonchalantly adds, securely sits in a vault in the basement of his house. This strikes Max profoundly and images of his youth and his vineyard rush back to him again. Now certain with a decision, Max goes back to Sir Nigel and asks his gray, efficacious boss: “When do you ever see it, Nigel? The real one? When do you look at it? Do you make late-night pilgrimages down to the vault just to see it or . . . ?”

Asked about what he meant, the scene is cut and the next one shows the retired successful trader back in Provence taking back the woman he loved and the life he all along wanted to live. 


*

When Vincent van Gogh submitted himself to an insane asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France on May 1889, the artist was in the middle of his late period which saw the beautiful Starry Night Over the Rhone and his famous The Starry Night created. The thick swirls and dark strokes of night skies splashed with hopeful stars—and these would increasingly grow thicker, darker, and brighter—would distinguish not only some of his later works but, as held by most, also symbolize his deteriorating mental state toward the end of his life.

Starry Night over the Rhone, September 1888

The Starry Night, June 1889

Bouts of debilitating depression, psychoses, epileptic attacks and delusions had been plaguing the genius, requiring several hospitalizations. In one unfortunate instance in December of 1888, he threatened the life of Paul Gauguin, a fellow artist he had befriended earlier, with a knife. That night, seeing that he was yet to effectively use his knife, he cuts off his own ear, wraps it up and gives it to a prostitute who we can presume was anything but delighted.

Unbalanced, condemned to be a lone artist, though still one of the most gifted painters of his time, van Gogh would continue to yield the only weapon he possessed to ward off his demons in the sanatorium. He would do there what he did best: he would paint, and paint, and paint at a furious pace. Cut off from the world he had retreated from and which wearied him so, van Gogh would there take inspiration from what he would see in his supervised evening walks around the asylum.

What particularly caught the eye of the artist during those times, along with olive trees, were cypress trees. I imagine his awe and fear of those natural towers, ones which are usually found in cemeteries, lording it over the moonlit paths he took at night. Shaped like a candle, straight as an arrow that shoots to the heavens, cypresses have since ancient times been referred to as both the tree of life and the tree of mourning. The paradox, while clear, is amusing.

Vincent would later confess his fascination with cypress trees to his brother, Theo. Referring to cypresses, he wonders in a letter penned in the asylum:

It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them . . . It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes and the most difficult to hit off exactly. (25 June 1889)

Road with Cypress and Star, May 1890

Road with Cypress and Star, completed a year later in May 1890—around the time he finally left the asylum in Saint-Rémy—would be what he later on called his “last attempt” in depicting his beloved cypresses on canvas. In another letter accompanied by a sketch of the painting, van Gogh describes the work to Gauguin, who had since forgiven his one time knife-carrying friend:

I also have a cypress with a star from down there. . . . A last attempt—a night sky with a moon without brightness, the slender crescent barely emerging from the opaque projected shadow of the earth—a star with exaggerated brightness, if you like, a soft brightness of pink and green in the ultramarine sky where clouds run. Below, a road bordered by tall yellow canes behind which are the blue low Alpilles, an old inn with orange lighted windows and a very tall cypress, very straight, very dark.

On the road a yellow carriage harnessed to a white horse, and two late walkers. Very romantic if you like, but also ‘Provençal’ I think. (17 June 1890)

On July 27, at age 37 and two months after giving up on breathing life into the dark cypresses of his nights in Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh would walk into a field of wheat with a revolver and shoot himself in the chest. While he would survive from the blow, he would die two nights later. To a mourning Theo by his side, Vincent’s last words were “The sadness will last forever.”

*

Road with Cypress and Star may initially confuse the viewer who may not be familiar with its name. Two different heavenly bodies hang on the ultramarine sky. While the moon betrays itself with its crescent shape, the other, much brighter body on the left, with its yellow and green radiance, may be mistaken for the sun. That said, van Gogh’s stars and moons are more difficult to distinguish from each other in earlier works such as The Starry Night and Starry Night over the Rhone where more stars light up the night sky.

But in Road with Cypress and Star van Gogh only gives us a lonely star, which is then accompanied by a redundant moon “without brightness.” The world at the same time looks brighter and darker for the melancholy. The scene below is nevertheless lighted sufficiently, and even more so than the earlier works. The light from this single star, deceptive at first, should then be more brilliant than van Gogh’s earlier, more numerous stars.

Dominating the painting is van Gogh’s beloved cypress tree. Its tip exceeds the top of the frame, its blacks and dark greens contrast the blues of the sky and the browns of the canes, and it stands right in the middle—something which is counter-intuitive because the eyes find it harder to focus on the middle of a painting or a photograph, and because it delays the viewer from attending to the other elements in the work. The cypress’ odd placement cuts the canvas in two and separates the effulgent star and the shadowed moon. The cypress reveals its two faces here, one that celebrates the brilliance of life, the other that mourns nightfall and death.

The contrast in the sky marked by the cypress is replicated in a more evident manner below by a divided road. The bypath on the left is constricted and narrow as it begins, while the path on the right is easily accessible. On the wider path on the right we see two “late walkers” enjoying the cool and “romantic” night. Behind them a horse with a carriage, presumably following their direction, has just appeared.

Van Gogh is telling us something here, that these late-night pilgrims have chosen the easier yet less illumined way; and that while they may have in the day persisted on seeing things as they are, or things as they should be, they have by the dead of night resigned themselves to what may be counterfeit and mere copies of the real thing.

The moon waxes and wanes, fights and gives up, as stars may light up the skies or altogether hide—as does our love for this earth. Love gratuitously bestows black evenings with glow and hope, and sustains the breath of the artist who despite many failures still believes that the world’s beauty could be attained and real happiness could be reached. Love of life is the counterweight of the enigmatic darkness and eternal sorrow of the world, and the artist is the balance on which truth and happiness are weighed.

But no amount of love can ever match the weight of an indifferent world. The colors on his canvas inevitably fade because the artist can only use paint diluted with tears.

Melancholy, December 1883

June 30, 2010
For Arnel Reniedo

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 6: Some Acts of Hope in the Face of the Darkness

The climate crisis that faces humanity is so immense that if one takes it seriously it would be easy to embrace despair and wait for the heat to smother us. I feel exactly this way some of these days. With the sun raging through most of our waking hours and our nights blanketing me in the proverbial blanket of oppressive heat, I cannot imagine better days although I know they are coming. They are, aren't they? They always have before. But then, it has never been this hot before. So, as I toss and turn in the long, long summer days, I cannot think past this oppressiveness—especially because I know the phenomenon is rooted in the undoing of our planet's mechanisms. As I languish in the birthing of the new world that is the fruit of our spiraling consumption, I wonder if there is anything that can be done.


As most of the accepted studies point out, there is no longer any way to stop global warming. Even if we are able to reduce greenhouse gases to those of the year 2000, global temperature will still increase by 0.6 degree Celsius. But at the rate, we are going the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a rise of up to 2.5% by 2050. The best we can do is prepare for it and, with great collective effort, we can still mitigate its effects. There is no fix. What can we do? Re-trap the carbon in the sea or earth? Revitalize denuded forests? Find some technological fix that will allow us to consume as much while expending less carbon? All these fixes are only going to mitigate the effects of the warming that we have already initiated. According to Mark Maslin, “Scientists believe a cut of between 60 and 80% [of greenhouse emission gases] is required to avoid the worst effects of global warming. And what are these worst effects? The expected 2.5 degrees already spell unpredictable flooding, droughts, deaths of coral reefs, increasing rates of extinction, reduced water supply, drying up of rain forests, melting of glaciers, increased spread of disease, the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people and the displacement of millions more. How do we stop this? What can we do when the very mechanism of our planet has somehow been misaligned? How does one fix a mechanism which is so complex that one purported fix could effect countless devastating side-effects?

And so here I am in my helplessness while I watch the world I love turn inhospitable to the deadly, ungrateful parasite that calls it home. Maybe global warming is the fever that is meant to purge mother earth of parasites like us—if there are any others like us, which is unlikely. I want to think that there is hope and most writers on the environmental crisis seem to think so. But from where I swelter in earth's rising fever, pest that I am, I can only feel that my host is determined to rid herself of my kind. I cannot think of a fix in this heat, and the more I learn about what is going on, the more I feel that I should give up in utter atonement for my sins and the sins of my fathers and my colonizers.

Still, because I intuit a good in the universe, because I am bound to this good in love, and because I intuit the promise of indestructible good in my fellow human beings—undesirable parasites though we have become—I am called to hope and do the good if only as an act of fidelity to the love that calls us to be. And so we must hope by being steadfast in our goodness and in our desire to do good by the world that is still so good to us despite our ingratitude. Remaining steadfast in the face of the darkness, despite the fact that the world as we know it is ending while others dance mindlessly into the night, is important for it keeps the presence of good and love in a world dying from mindlessness and greed. Love being realized is love presencing. Ahimsa being lived by its adherents is ahimsa presencing in the world. In its presencing, love is able to touch the broken heart that knows only to take and consume and destroy. The presence of love could build hearts capable to opening to the love that presences and the value of the world that is seen as commodity and resource could shine forth as a truth and beauty other than just that for the eyes of the awakened.

How then do we save the world? With little acts of love. Think of conservation through the prism of love and you will figure it out. Because little people committing little acts of love can channel the transforming powers of love, the very power that runs through countless stars, to the transformation of parasites into creative persons. What is needed is fidelity among those who love the world, that is fidelity to the source of love and faith in its power to restore by staying true to one’s goodness and creativity. This could mean doing the simplest things that almost seem like nothing:

• Cut down on consumption of everything from electricity to meat. Consumption is the number one problem of the earth. Because there are so many of us consuming so much, we have strained the earth's carrying capacity. Reducing one's consumption no matter by how much is an act of cleansing one's self of one's excessive and unnecessary violence. Everyone has to commit some act of violence to survive. Eating of anything is a reduction of an other being to your self. By reducing consumption, we reduce our acts of violence to the necessary ones and thereby reduce our acts of violence to the minimum necessary amount. But also, by doing that, one learns the joy of living lightly without too much baggage. The less one needs, the more one has opportunities for happiness unsupported by artificial supports, and the more one is free to be generous to others.

• Eat less meat mainly because it takes so much petroleum, land, water, and basic cereals to raise them. Cows also contribute much to global warming because their farts are methane and because we kill so much rain forest to raise them. On top of that, raising more meat deprives more poor people of food. Meat is only accessible to the well off. The more land is used for meat, the less land is there to use for the food accessible to the poor. The more meat is grown, the more grain is used by meat growers and the more expensive grain becomes for those who rely on grain for their energy. In effect, the more meat we produce, the more the poor are deprived of affordable foods. Consider your reduction of meat consumption an act of generosity and solidarity.

• Buy more from the market and less from the grocery. By doing that, you lessen polluting packaging. If there is a small market of informal sellers near your neighborhood, try to buy from there. This way you will save on carbon emissions and you will support small entrepreneurs who need your support. Of course, this may cost you more but if you can afford it you should because you're paying to support entrepreneurs from the marginalized groups.

• Look for products that are organic (because they are less polluting). Better yet, buy local organic products because they are more simply packaged without too many frills (thus without too much cost on the environment), they don't release all that much carbon to transport, and they support local labor. Even more importantly, buy organic products that are local and are committed to supporting marginalized communities.

• Buy simple products that require less packaging or processing. It may be prettier but the more packaging something comes in, the more materials it uses up, the more natural resources it consumes, the more it pollutes, and the more energy it takes to make. The prettier it is, there is also a greater possibility that it came from some first world country which means that it was made in a fellow developing country where workers are exploited before it was shipped to us.

• Try to be less fancy about your tastes. When you have highly developed palates that demand the best from the world like coffee from Africa, cheese from Switzerland, and beef from Japan or Australia, it costs more carbon points to get it the way it is and to get it here from there. I know that it makes a world of difference to acquire and consume these highly developed meats, that its worth dying for and killing for those spices, but your highly developed tastes could be forcing African farmers to enter into a trade economy that forces them deeper into debt or for cows to live in ways that are violative of their good or for vast tracks of badly needed rain forests to be destroyed.

• Try to ask for simpler things: less packaged, less processed, less fancy, less expensive. Try to not live expensively because the higher your lifestyle the more people, animals, plants, and minerals you have to exploit to generate a sufficient income.

• Avoid eating in big fastfoods chains. They grow their animals cruelly. Chickens are packed in cages without light and without enough space to move. All livestock are fed antibiotics to stay alive because they can't move. They also use a lot of Styrofoam to pack food which is very bad by way of solid waste because it takes forever to degrade and it releases toxins into our food and water when used.

• Avoid wasting food. Too much food ends up in the trash. If you don't eat and waste too much, you don't demand too much food and more of it will be available to the poor. Less demand, lower prices. Lower prices, more affordable food available to the starving millions.

• Try not to travel too much. I know we all need a break from our surroundings-especially when we live in the city which is really not built for creative human habitation. However, our getaways have an environmental cost—especially air travel. On top of that, we create an artificial strain on the local population and natural environment as tourists. Notice how in tourist spots life changes for the people and animals around these places.

• Don’t waste. Only use as much as can be justified. Everything, even water, is scarce thus every time we use something we end up depriving others of a resource that could have been put to better or more essential use. So before you spend on something expensive, or rare, or fancy, or high tech ask yourself will this excessive expenditure allow me to function better? Will it allow me to serve others more effectively? Will it make me more able to bring about a better life or a better world for humanity even if I accomplish this in a small way? Will consuming or owning things make me a better person such that despite everyone else’s sacrifice (the farmers in Agusan, the laborers all over the world who are not paid just wages and are victims of contractualization, the animals who had to die for this, the children who may not have clean drinking water for this) is worth it?

• Quit the upgrading habit for electronics. Try to use your old applicances as much as it is efficient and still working. E-waste is very destructive. Try to buy things that last.

• Better yet, stop accumulating stuff and stop needing to have new things.

• Find your peace as much as you can. The deeper you are at peace with yourself, the less you will have to shop, to eat, to travel, to golf, to entertain yourself at such a high cost to everyone and everything. It’s hard but let’s try for all our sakes.

These are the simple and not so simple acts of love we can do to generate hope or to invigorate the forces of love that can transform this fevered world and this sick species that is spoiling its own nest. But let’s all start small with the love we can do. The capacity for love and generosity is one that needs to be exercised. One should not aim too high too quickly but build on what is possible and fruitful. But we must also never be content with staying where we are.

Soon, more will be asked of us. Greater acts of love will be called for as the greater effects of our self-involved lifestyles will threaten our species and every other form of life on earth. If we exercise our capacity to open to all that is now, perhaps then we can respond according to the measure we are called to. And maybe we can rise to the occasion of the catastrophe we have created.

The Embarrassment of My Yellow Vote

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The real title of this essay should be “Why, Despite My Commitment to the Effort to Build a Just Nation for the Marginalized, I Will Vote for Noynoy.” But the title above is shorter.

I try not to tell anyone that I will vote for Noynoy. I am deeply embarrassed by that fact because it could really be seen as a betrayal of my commitment to the marginalized and oppressed for whose liberation I have committed my adult life. I do believe that anyone who considers herself not just a liberal but a committed worker for the liberation of the marginalized from their marginalization should have serious qualms about voting for Noynoy Aquino. This is because he doesn’t genuinely understand the travails of our people and he is too entrenched in his class’ world view to ever understand or desire to genuinely liberate the downtrodden.

I say this mainly because of his attitude and non-action in relation to the Hacienda Luisita issue as much as anything else. What he says every time this issue is brought up is something like their family does not own a controlling share of the hacienda; or that his family is not involved in the management of the hacienda; or that it is a complex issue. What is this complex issue? It seems simple enough from the perspective of justice and fairness. That land was supposed to be distributed to its tenants because it is morally theirs anyway. The family patriarch Jose Cojuangco “acquired the plantation from Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas in 1957 on a dollar loan guaranteed by the government ‘with the view of distributing the hacienda to small farmers.’”[1] Therefore the land does not genuinely belong to the family because the hacienda land was purchased in bad faith and clearly the tenants should long have been its owners. Now that the Cojuangco family has built an empire and a vast fortune from the land meant to be distributed to small farmers, maybe they can do right by way of the farmers and the government that backed their acquisition of the land. They also owe that land to the farmers because the Cory Constitution recognized, as a social justice principle by which this nation stands, the need to redistribute land to the landless because it is what justice demands and it is what long term development for all needs. But when it was their turn to do right by the people, the family subverted land reform by imposing some Stock Distribution Option (SDO) and Land Use Conversion scheme thereby further depriving these farmers of the opportunity of controlling productive assets that they have been systematically deprived of all their lives. The family and corporation not only immorally deprived their own tenants of their constitutional right to land reform, but they also converted so much of the land that was supposed to be distributed into highways, golf courses, and subdivisions so that there will be so much less to distribute. That’s simply bad faith and could be interpreted as malicious disregard of what the tenants are fighting for. And then there is that hard to ignore matter of the massacre and the systematic murder of the grassroots leaders who were fighting for workers’ rights and were trying to break the family’s desperate hold on the land. It seems a little too coincidental that these leaders were killed when they were about to engage in some significant action against the interests of the Luisita management. They say that the organizations of the far left are mainly responsible for these assassinations but the coincidence is just so uncanny that it makes me wonder if this family isn’t too caught up in the traditional haciendero role.

All that said, what does this have to do with Noynoy? If indeed he didn’t have anything to do with these incidents, and it seems that he didn’t, and knowing that there are people in his family that are determined to keep their wealth even at the cost of justice and the well-being and development of many other lives—why hasn’t he completely divested himself of their family interests in this vast reminder of the continuing injustice that keeps this country so poor? Why doesn’t he say something like I’m powerless to change my family’s ways, that corporation is beyond my control, but it has caused so much bloodshed and continues to cause misery, it was acquired in bad faith and was maintained through a system of oppression and deception, I want nothing to do with it. I will not gain from it, and I will as a man of some influence and power work to restore that land to right. Why can’t he do that? Why hasn’t he said anything like that? Maybe because he thinks that his family and his class do have a right to their riches and the national resources that they monopolize. I think he doesn’t see the social justice issue with regard to Luisita because he is blind to the way the elite have built an economic system that allows them to utilize national resources for their own benefit and a political system that supports their right to monopolize. He doesn’t seem to get it at all. He thinks that our nation’s poverty is mainly caused by corruption and if we eradicate corruption, we will eradicate poverty.

Anyone who has studied poverty and development in this country understands that our lack of development and massive poverty is rooted in injustice. The reason the poor are poor is because they have been marginalized by those who control the nation’s resources from effectively using these resources to build good lives according to their own aspirations. Haciendas are the clearest examples of this. For decades, the Filipino elite, not to mention foreign corporations, have systematically deprived small farmers of their land, sometimes of their ancestral domains, through illegal titling of pasture lands or forests, by aggressive occupation, through outright coercion, and mainly by deceptively trapping them in a cash economy they did not understand nor were they interested in engaging in. The ancestors of many of the marginalized today come from communities of people who were deprived of the land where they cultivated the kinds of lives that allowed them to flourish as people. But because they stood in the way of the elite’s need to acquire and consume, they were deprived of the site of their human flourishing and their children and their children’s children have been used as ill-paid and exploited generators of wealth.

The tenants of Hacienda Luisita are the progeny of these peoples deprived of the place of their human flourishing. They are the inheritors of the unjust marginalization of their ancestors. The owners of Luisita, those who amassed great wealth from its consolidation and exploitation, are the inheritors of the fruit of the injustice inflicted upon the people. By their continued ownership of this land, they are depriving generations of hard working farmers of the opportunity to regain a place to possibly rebuild sites for their human flourishing where they determine what they are working for and what good it will serve, not to mention whose good it will serve. By insisting that they have a right to the land, the tenants are only affirming a principle enshrined in the Constitution and the CARP law. They are only trying to get past the hacienda’s owners’ skillful legal and political maneuverings in order to restore to them land that needs to be restored to the marginalized in order to begin the long task of uplifting the exploited and making them productive and empowered citizens of our nation.

By allowing the land to be reformed, to be restored to the deprived, the beneficiaries from injustice will be able to restore themselves as well to their potential as creative people. They will free themselves from being participants and captives to a destructive and unjust system that conditions them to be unjust people who can easily cause the death and suffering of others. Thusly, they will be freed to realize their potential for heroism, self sacrifice, and justice. This family has amassed wealth beyond what is just, what is healthy for them, and what is necessary for many lifetimes. The wealth they have amassed can be invested otherwise. They should free themselves from this evil from their past and move on to a clean start or to actually serve the nation.

When Noynoy speaks about the hacienda and their holdings, there is no hint that he understands why the farmers have a right to this land. There is no sense that his family’s wealth was amassed through injustice. There is no indication that he understands that the poverty of the marginalized is the fruit of acts of violence committed upon them by an aggressive and exploitative class of Filipinos to which he belongs. This is why he believes that corruption is the major cause of poverty. It makes it seem that we only need to rid our system of parasitic politicians and so much money will be freed for good government programs to help the poor. But corruption is only one symptom of the problem. If you rid the system of corruption you will only make the nation a better site for the goings on of mainstream business, much of which deprives the poor of their capacity to be genuinely productive participants in economic development. We will not have been able to ensure that the marginalized are empowered to engage society creatively because the elite will still have the monopoly of the resources and opportunities to shape this nation as it serves them. Thus, if Noynoy becomes president, I have no hope that he will understand the roots of poverty and that he will be able to address this effectively and decisively. And that’s why I say that anyone who has a deep concern for the liberation of the marginalized will have a hard time justifying their support for Noynoy.

However, there is this. His closest competitor has even less sense of the plight of the poor and it will be even more doubtful that he will do anything significant for them. Villar, despite his deceptive claims to be of the poor, was clearly not. They were probably even one of those families in Tondo that exploited their poor neighbors. Worst of all, he is a predatory businessman who will probably work to strengthen the position and interests only of the business class at best and strengthen and propagate his own interests at worst. Plus his style of being a politician leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Good grief! How badly handled was that Noynoy is psychologically “sablay” campaign? Gibo seems to be a good technocrat but I have my doubts about the integrity of a man who was able to serve under such a corrupt and blatantly self serving administration. Perlas gets it but doesn’t have the political suave to push reforms through. The leaders from the religious right don’t give me confidence that they understand democratic and plural systems. Gordon is a manager but he has too much of a middle class sensibility to understand the injustice of poverty. The rest are not worth seriously considering.

So what does Noynoy have that wins my reluctant vote? Simply this: there are people in the Liberal Party who do get it. With my vote for Noynoy I am casting a vote for the progressives in the Liberal Party who now seem to have the upper hand over the majority of trapos who populate it. Although the Liberal Party is still a traditional political party that is held together mostly by the self-interest of politicians whose sole interest is their political flourishing, there has been a group of rather progressive—very progressive by way of the standards of traditional politics—who have been leaders in recent moves to reform the political and electoral system. In the last decade, the Liberal Party has actively worked to build itself a functioning policy arm and tried to organize some of its constituents into active participants in formulating policy. They have tried to build the party membership. This group has also been active in pushing for reforms in our laws to ensure that political parties build actual constituencies, that they be more policy and platform oriented, and that they have adequate sources of funds so that they are not beholden to any interests during elections. Leaders of the party also worked hard for crucial social and economic reforms such as CARPER and the strengthening of local autonomy as well as people’s participation in governance. Mar Roxas was even an important leader in the WTO negotiations representing the interests of the developing world. Of course there are still the majority members who are mainly aligned with the LP and Noynoy because they can smell Malacañang on him and the party. But the significant minority that defines policy and spells out the agenda for reform do get the need to go deeper into the country’s ills than merely rooting out corruption.

So, the long and short of this is I give Noynoy and Mar my vote because I have hope in the Liberal Party. Don’t get me wrong, I still think they are too much oriented toward the traditional political view of politics and society to be able to take us to the just and sustainably prosperous nation that we aspire for. However, for a traditional party with enough good people, they could just bring about significant reforms and open the space for the work of genuine empowerment and liberation to flourish.

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[1] http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20100310-257749/Agrarian-reform-Long-on-promises-short-on-performance. accessed 29 April 2010. PDI MARCH 10, 2010, I-TEAM REPORT: THINK ISSUES
Agrarian reform: Long on promises, short on performance, By Fernando del Mundo, Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:11:00 03/10/2010

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 5: Afternoon Interlude

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

As I sit on the ground under the tree that is extending itself in every direction to meet the explosion of sunlight, my son runs in the field with a kite dancing, fluttering, taking height, crashing, being wildly dragged, and dancing, dancing, dancing behind him. The day is structured for joy. The wind is set to match the rapid rush of feet barely touching ground. The abundance of space holds up the joy of vibrant life asserting itself in stillness. The light that comes as an unending smile reigns upon us all. The architecture of the day makes me well from inside. Yet, while dwelling in all of this, I am sitting on the brown grass. I am on a dry carpet of dead things. The grass is so dead that it feels like it would kill the cow that would devour it.

This moment in the joy of the day feels like eternity. Joy is precisely like that—a still day swelling with sunshine. One does not feel the day in the shade as moving—especially as something moving toward something else or to sometime better. It does not serve a better time nor is it intending a future or past. The joy of this moment is that there is nothing else than this moment—nothing further. There is nothing past this moment, there is only this event of the dancing kite, the flying child, and the man in the shade given to himself as the blessed one to whom the day is given. I do so love the pleasure of this day despite the fact that I am nested on the remains of dead things.

Sitting on the grass, watching a boy find joy in the wind his running generates, I being grateful in the shade—how can one not beam back at the sun? And still I am very aware that the ground beneath me which a few months ago was so saturated with water is today beginning to turn into dust, and soon it will be cracking. It is cool where I am. When the wind blows it is refreshing. Still the grass has stopped growing and further north in this country, crops and livestock--more truly plants and animals--are drying up unto death. Here in the shade I cannot see this but I know and cannot help but know. Despite this I am happy and content and my heart cannot help but murmur joy, joy, joy!


At the end of the world as we know it, joy is tempered by the oncoming changes—changes that will touch the boy with the kite more than the middle aged man happy in his day. How dare I be happy? This bright day could signal the hard times to come—just as the beautiful sunsets we have witnessed in the last years bring to vision the pollutants we have scattered to the sky. At the end of the world as we know it, how do we face the joy of today when it is tainted with the potential of future catastrophe? But is this not the reality of life, however we know it? Isn't every day's joy tainted already with the ultimate catastrophe of death and perhaps the even more catastrophic reality of suffering? Mostly, we embrace our joy and value it by averting our eyes and forgetting about what is to come. Most of us live each moment piling stimulation upon stimulation to simulate joy and effect forgetfulness. But not all of us open to joy in this way. There are those among us who can see the joy of joy because they can see past suffering and death into a greater life. The joy of a day can be honestly embraced because it signals what existence connotes beyond the contingency of this particular joy.

I sit on the dead grass, I let the sun seep into my psyche, I soak up my son’s joy and all is well in the world whatever the next moment brings because what it all boils down to, what it all ends up being, however all things in time end, there is this joy that promises that all time begins and ends in this joy. Sitting here, the day that embraces me bursts with that certainty. There is this moment’s joy and every moment will find its perfection in it. Every other pain, every other sorrow, every other horror in time is but a passing moment in the unmoved and unmoving day that we will all awaken to.

And so this day at the edge of the end of life as we know it signals both the difficulties to come and the joy to come. The difficulties will have to be faced and endured and surpassed to a better day. The joy to come will be embraced and it will fill all the dark difficulties we will endure with the light of this day, with its peals of joy, with its shade and comfort—and it will be the final moment. It will be the last moment and it will not be an ending but an enduring. The fullness that is this joy will gather every moment to its fullness.

Thus, although I know that this time will end—that I will have to rise from the shade, I will reluctantly call the boy in, that we will gather our things, the sun will set, and perhaps the drought will worsen—I revel in it knowing that it is a hint of the final moment when the troubles will finally be lifted.

Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 4: It’s the End of the World as We Know It and We Ought to Feel Fine

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

When the world ends, we can begin to speak about hope. The world as we know it is ending…at least I think it is. Perhaps I should say at least I fear it is and I also hope it is.

I like the world as we know it. I have a comfortable position in it. I earn enough so that I have health insurance, I can send my children to school, I can buy enough good food to keep me healthy, I can maintain a nice house, I have a car that works well, my children have what they want and a lot of what they need, I have leisure time, and I can buy stuff that I like. I can live this way because I belong to the class that benefits from civilization as we know it. Thus, I am worried about the end of the world as we know it. I just actually got where I am. I am an upwardly mobile professor in a school that pays people like me well enough. I can purchase luxuries that make my life comfortable and make me feel pampered. And so, thinking that this world will end and that we will have to give up most of the luxuries that I have just began to be able to afford makes me feel sad. But more than that, thinking about what is to come and how we will have to face it also scares me. How will we deal with the scarcity of food when global warming hits hardest, petroleum runs out, water becomes difficult to come by and topsoil is depleted? What adjustments will we make when we can’t rely on mass production? How will life be when we can’t buy new toys and gadgets and we can’t rely on the constant novelty of consumer products to make us feel that existence is interesting and leading somewhere?

Certainly, compared to many people of my class and capacities, I don’t spend that much. What I earn is a mere pittance compared to what I could earn if I worked in a corporation. However, I began my adult life as a teacher with teacher’s aspirations and with most teachers’ modest dreams. So now that I earn as much as an associate professor who is occasionally able to engage multilateral organizations for modest projects with decent fees, I feel on the top of the world. I don’t have a really nice car. The one I love is already 20 years old. My bikes have always been second hand and never exactly fit my frame because I can’t really spend too much on them. My family’s computers are always the cheapest, most decent things that work and never cost more than Php 24,000. These gadgets are also always paid for in monthly installments. My books are mostly second hand or bought with grants. I have two pairs of formal pants that are at least 10 years old, my work shirts don’t usually cost more than Php 500, and my family doesn’t usually go on expensive vacations, and we rarely eat out in expensive restaurants. A Php 500 a plate place is really swanky for us and we haven’t left the country together at all. In fact, only one of us goes abroad for vacations. So, although I benefit from this world that we know, I don’t really need that much from it and we are even trying to lessen our impact on it.



In the last year, my family, with the leadership of my wife, has reduced our consumption of beef because it takes so much water, so much land, so much grain, so much fuel to raise cows. On top of that cows’ burps and farts significantly contribute to global warming. (Look it up!) We use organic shampoo and soaps because these are gentler on our water and the making of the products we buy support local communities. We compost in our home to cut down on solid waste and we grow vegetables in our tiny yard just because it seems like the right thing to do. We do these things because we like to cut down on our impact on the world. We really don’t want the earth or others to pay for the lives we live. So as much as we can, we try to support our local community, to put our savings into a small farming enterprise to help in food production, increase employment (for two people sad to say), and try to find betters ways of raising livestock. But it’s a real struggle because the world as we know it does not support lifestyles that consciously aim to serve nature and our neighbors or at least to mitigate our effects on it.

Although we have decided to live with a somewhat lighter carbon, water, and whatever you call the footprint that is left on your neighbor’s back because of your high cost lifestyle, I find myself still walking heavily on the earth. I use up perhaps enough electricity to power three households in Daang Tubo (and that despite living in an airconless home). I spend on entertainment a year as much as a family of five would for food in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur. We spend enough on food a year to house four urban poor families in Payatas. How do we earn this money? Thankfully without having to exploit anyone directly: my wife lawyers for the Supreme Court and I teach and do poverty research. But in the end, despite our desire to serve others with out work, live without exploiting those we serve, and not to destroy nature we are moved by our world to do so. How? My salary is probably sustained by people who may have earned their profits through the contractualization of labor, through the under pricing of produce of small farmers, or the overpricing of farm inputs. The affordable food on my table is probably produced in farms where pigs and chickens are bred in cruel conditions and seasonal workers are paid non-livable wages. If I wish to engage in leisure activities, it is easiest to spend time in a mall buying items that will end up as clutter in our home and to waste it on unfulfilling activities. It’s cheaper to eat junk than fresh and healthy food. It’s cheaper and easier to watch insightless films than to watch well-thought out, well produced theatre.

Our societies are structured in such a way that mass produced junk is made more accessible and more desirable than things that are healthy and perhaps more suited to human flourishing. Not only that, the way our societies are structured, we are taught to desire what is more destructive and more violent to the earth and fellow human beings than things that have less impact and are more creative. For instance, I could be easily drawn to obsessing over a computer game that will give me a headache and perhaps make me ill-tempered than to do some other thing more suited to me and can, on the whole, give me a greater sense of well-being: in my case working on my garden, reading a book, or writing. Eating junk that I don’t need to eat because I don’t really need to eat but can is easier than just being content with the nutrition I am able to ingest fruitfully. Making huge amounts of profit without having produced anything of lasting value is easier than long term investments in activities that will produce better food, sustainable development, or opportunities for human creativity. The world as we know it exists to amuse us, to feed into our need for accumulation, to stimulate our consumption, and to keep us busy with empty activities that leave us bored and restless. At the same time, it makes it difficult to live in a just way, to consume in moderation, and to tread lightly on the earth.



You might say, well then, isn’t that all about choices? Stop blaming society for the choices that we make. Just choose otherwise. However, more often than not, the choices for a better life are taken away from us. A destructive game of mass consumption and accumulation has been set up as the paradigm of modern economies and civilizations such that the default mode for living in the more “civilized” areas of our world means buying into mass farming, encouraging polluting processes of manufacturing, and being involved in enterprises that tend to exploit the exploitable. It’s not so easy to choose otherwise unless you choose to live in the margins of our civilization. Many people are doing that—most not out of choice. But that isn’t the answer because the world as we know it, the civilization that dominates our planet, has caused global warming, the scarcity of food, pollution, the destruction of nature, and it is just not sustainable for most of us, or even a significant minority of us, to live this way. But then, the world as we know it is ending. History is presenting us today or will be presenting us with a chance to rethink and rebuild our civilizations according to other values, other ways of being.

And so, scary as it seems, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m sad and scared but it should be fine. After all, just as I am beginning to cash in on a life of hard work and saving, I realize that even with my modest dreams I am destroying my world and causing the hardship of others who are with me now and to come. And this is because the world as we know it, life as we live it, is structured in such a way that we are violent to our world, to each other and to our selves. And so it has to end—just when I got to the top of it. However, I can say that despite the cataclysmic shocks that will signal the need to transition to a better life, I am glad for it.

"Showtime!": Not Just Entertainment

by Geoffrey Guevara

The fairly new noontime program, "Showtime!" is rating high in the viewership polls. It's a simple show--group performances are evaluated by a panel of judges. The group with the highest score wins and advances to the weekly finals, then to the monthly, until the grand finals. It's not very different from old school TV contests such as those in Eat…Bulaga!, the defunct MTB and Chowtime Na! There's nothing new in its mechanics either—the style of judges rating (or berating) contestants is stolen from American Idol and America's Got Talent.

I initially had doubts about this program’s success. With the many ABS-CBN programs that have come and gone, I thought that this would be just another program that was bound to die as soon as it learned to breathe. However, tuning in to the show, I can't help but be glued to the screen because of the promise of more surprises from the production numbers and the candor of the hosts’ and judges’ comments. But more than its production values, there is something in the show which engages the audiences both in the live studio and in the homes. Simply put, the show is entertaining.

When the show was just starting (and probably when it still wasn’t clear what it was about) Vice Ganda, one of the judges, was able to articulate what the show is about. He said, "This is not a talent show! We want to be entertained." And so began the entertainment. It came from the contestants’ acts, the diverse reactions of the judges, and the energies of its audience and hosts. And although the contestants are serious about their performances—they perform in the spirit of fun. The show is not stressful even to the contestants. That is the appeal of the show.

"Showtime!" came at the time when we were all dead tired from the successive disasters of floods, typhoons, capsizing ships, and, currently, confusion of our political situation. People just wanted to be entertained—they wanted not to have to worry about anything anymore, to just be hedonistically happy, to be free. "Showtime!" provided that entertainment. No contestant needed to be saved through text votes (the viewers though can get rid of heartless judges). The audience is not kept at the edge of their seats worrying if their favorite is going to win or not. Nothing is at stake—not even the contestants’ dignity. "Showtime!"promises nothing but raw entertainment.

Despite its clear entertainment value, we have to ask what is new about the entertainment this show is offering? Wowowee! and Eat… Bulaga! offer the same kind of entertainment. However, there is one difference –Showtime!’s entertainment isn’t tied to its prize money. Sure, it has a 50K prize for the daily winner but the hosts don’t harp on this fact as if it were the end all and be all of the show. Money is not used to make the participants act like fools on stage divulging every bit of drama in their lives. Neither is it used to make them exaggerate their own infirmities and bad traits. Their jingle hits it right on the mark: "'Di namin nais yaman sa mundo para sumaya... basta't kasama kapamilya..." What the contestants seek is their two minutes of fame, two minutes of realizing their dream to perform on stage, on national TV. Even contestants themselves validate this, "Gusto lang namin magperform. Mapakita ang kaya namin. Kahit hindi kami manalo." And that's enough for them. Hence, no dramatics and theatrics are involved. Just entertainment. Just fun stuff.

These days, it seems that the measure of success and happiness for the mainstream and elite culture is the accumulation of wealth and power. Greatness in politics and success in governance is measured by the number of projects and benefits thrown to the masses and the growth in GNP/GDP. The “fulfilled” man is measured by the number of degrees, honors and amount of cash he has at hand. Though these are also important, if we're going to take it from the success this new show, it seems that the ordinary Filipino has other ambitions. The basic value of communal fun ("sama-samang saya") and having an avenue to showcase local raw talent is enough.

"Showtime!" gives hope to the underrated, unnoticed and unnamed talents out there. Hope comes not in the money they will win by displaying their talents on TV. The act of being seen and being heard is their signal fire--they refuse to remain nobodies. That is their motivation.

The success of "Showtime!" is its ability to reconnect and rearticulate this basic Filipino desire. The success of the Filipino is that it was given an avenue to be part of the mainstream forum again.