The 1 Percent power and their political cohorts may deliver wreaths to the wake and even a few money to the grieving while media's camera clicks. Little bits of benefits get worked out in Congress. People are temporarily happy. Gut level. Still, Power stays—new face, new coat, new narrative. The song remains the same. Etc etcetera.
Meanwhile, I never saw myself as a foot soldier. I am not a megaphone dude or I ever was the loudest voice in the plaza of protest. I don't know how to sing in a choir (although I was in school and church choir as a kid). I progressed into the pragmatic thinker who wrote or co-wrote the songs instead. Or manifestoes, tactics and strategies. I planned out and helped strategize a lot of moves in the streets in the `80s and `90s but only because those were interconnected acts of civil disobedience with a realizable outcome. Activism has a goal. People get hurt or killed or tear gassed and drowned in a fog of shit as truncheons flail and bullets fly. Yes, there are “collateral damages” but when “collateral damages” start to pile up and yet change hasn't come, you gotta sit back and think harder. Usher the giant white board. Restrategize.
Regroup, connect the dots, and (re)strategize a new plan how to tilt the order from bottom going up. What I did in those years? I wrote grants. I worked with non-government organizations and non-profits that implemented my socialist/Leftist rhetoric to pro-active fruition or concrete output. All pointed to food on the table and roof over heads. I worked with government agencies and political personalities and even sat as a young man in a think-tank that advised a presidential candidate.
I maximised my efforts by going beyond print. TV, radio, arts, performance, non-government organizations. I mingled not with just poor families whose dad and mom were on vigil in picketlines—but with the apolitical middle class and the snotty upper rich. I needed money to keep my community advocacy efforts moving so I knocked on doors. More than anything else, as the days succumbed to night, I restudied my white board and pulled out more data and info that I gathered as a journalist and editor. And I did all these while traveling like a madman—far and wide.
But I am not the guy who will yell in the streets or give you angry recitation. But I don't cry over spilled milk, either. I don't fizzle out terrified with sight of a dragon overhead, and I don't see all darkness in a long tunnel. I make a fire instead and help usher light. At least, that's what I did most of my 58 years of life.
More than anything else I save my energy and my resilience if a storm comes around again as I pursue my journey—because no storm or hurricane or whoever President will shut my spirits up. I am cool and good because I am cool and good inside me. I can drink the oil as long as it's the liquid that chases down ramens and paella in my tummy. With that, I get around—and how I got around.
ENJOY IT! Three winters ago, while I detained myself for three weeks in a Myrtle Beach hotel suite to finish my book--a young man quizzed me, "What's up with that?" He sort of inferred that I am a some kind of elitist upper class snot enjoying my warm room while he labored to pay his winter heating. Few months ago, another chastised me for "wasting" too much time watching a dozen or so Netflix TV series while she couldn't even afford a TV set or desktop comp. Or there are people who out me for buying/giving gifts or spending too much money on whatever.
The common denominator that runs in these "enlightened" souls' vein is--they are stressed out or in a funk. I can feel for those. Many years ago, while I raised my kids, I had to sustain 3 or 4 jobs and slept maybe 4 hours a day. I got so sick that I almost died. My mom and dad insisted that I slow down and they'd take care of my kids--but I maintained that my children are my responsibilities so I had to do what I should do. But blues and funk pervade in life. Many people can't even afford three bottles of beer to enjoy a cool blues band to chill or a futon bed purchased at Goodwill. They have bills to pay. So I am fortunate that I have a family that could pay or afford the blessings that I am enjoying. But then, I don't need to write my life's story and all that drama that comes with it to magnify my point--but can you imagine if there's no ESPN and Netflix and Bywater and Myrtle Beach and Las Vegas? I'd go nuts! That is, if I am not already one.
My family works "to death" and then enjoy the fruits of their labor by dancing under a generous sun, paid-up. Nothing is free. I vibe with a mindset that says, just enjoy it. If we can afford fun after the bills, why not? Enjoy blessings at the moment. In all the things that I do in life, I always say, let's get together and enjoy. There must be a way to balance the misery. It is not my fault that I frolicked in Vegas while 35 percent of humanity struggled to put food on the table. My mom used to tell me, "You can never solve the problem of the world. Enjoy America!" I do.
Let us enjoy what we have and love the ones we are with. Days from now, it's Halloween. Then Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year. Valentine's Day. Enjoy! I don't want to be a sour-butt about these. These are only consumerist if we consume it beyond what we can afford. If you can afford a nice candlelit dinner at Limones in downtown with your sweetheart, go for it. We need these sweet rituals. If you can't, then maybe you two can just snuggle up on the couch and watch "When Harry Met Sally" via a DVD, $3.00 Trader Joe's red wine and Aldi hummus. But if still you can't afford this? Uhh I don't know. The full moon may drop some love in the form of a pack of Starburst gummies maybe. Dig? Be happy.
MY family has a considerable enough presence on Facebook. Not just my kids but also my nieces and nephews (although my siblings aren't as active as I do). I read what everybody writes or posts. And I am glad that they don't participate in a lot of high-handed political discussions in here. It's not that it's bad to talk politics. But Facebook banter is different from a community forum or student council deliberation. My kids and immediate family members aren't dumb either. Most are honor students and graduates—cum laudes and scholars even. It seems they just don't see the point of having to argue more than discuss, judge people more than share truths, advocate than educate.
When I was their age, I was an angry, tormented soul. Angry because societal misery was right before my eyes. These weren't put on YouTube or written in blogs, or discussed on Facebook. It was so hard to be heard. Many times the truths and facts didn't even get to Page 16 of a newspaper. So as journalists we sought out the truth ourselves—thereby risking our life. These days, I feel, is a lot angrier than how it was. Why? Because anger is within, bottled up like a volcano's puke that couldn't let go, so people implode. I see implosion online and sometimes I get lured into that kind of anger again. I get provoked by cryptic words and prejudgments borne out of humanity's new-found courage to speak up from out of the distant confines of their tiny gadgets. And then I wake up. This is not the “anger” that I was familiar with. My anger found refuge in my poetry, fiction, music, art and community organizations.
Hence the anger subsided. It wasn't confined in the same comfort of my room, pounding away at my laptop's keys—and the rage bounces back at my face with no resolution or rest. The energy is inward—not outward. It is almost reactionary or reactive. One post, one cuss, one praise. One issue, one protest, one click. We are demobilized by a computer demigod that controls us from within. So instead of letting the fury out in a scream of dissent, we suffer from internal hemorrhage (sic). Fear collides with confusion. Alienation with indifference. We are unable to project our fear on a stage where it could ring out loud and heard. It's all clicks and one-posts and gone. Forgotten on the next click.
I am happy that my kids, and other kids and other people, see another side of social media that lightens up the dusk. Our grandchildren's new photos and Cyd The Koolcat's eyes. These cheer the heart and inspire us to create shapes out of our voices, sounds out of our hopes, healing to our wounds. But beyond this tiny gadget—where an audience of 20 or 25 attentively listen as against a “friends list” of 5,000 that is drowned by a thousand of clicks, slipping and sliding away as we refresh our page.
Let us enjoin the 5,000 out of the Page and over our Wall—and converge once again under a blue sky and clouds that don't come with a USB.
FATHER and CHILDREN. All my five children possess different at times contrasting reflex and response to life and living. Yet they vibe as one—like a musical band or a jazz quintet. They got their own instruments but they can play in one concert stage and come out awesome. Each mirror my 1001 personalities. It's like, if you can dig all my kids' sensibility and sensitivity, then you can never dig me. Such torment of knowing me, isn't it? One of my kids (who doesn't really enjoy being so social media public) just emailed me an update of her life. She is the independent soul with the ferocity of a wolf.
She reiterates, “Never have I, in my many years of studying, failed a class and I don't plan to change that record.” Such virulent confidence exuded in me as I pursued my own journey. Well, she is an Economics cum laude graduate and now in Law school, and will take the Bar this month. But as ever she insists on heading for the jugular on her own terms. “With or without a Law degree, I can be financially independent. It's just that I can help more people with it. I will enhance the power that I already have.” While at work on the legal profession, she also mentions about perennial job offers from high-end financial institutions in the region/Asia.
My daughter, since a kid, is a take-charge fireball. Yet like me and her, we also succumb to traditional family pressure/s. Most Filipinos define success as a respectable college degree and a paid-up house. Without those, you still got a whole lot of journeying to do. While many attained the first but not the other and vice versa—my family's fountainhead wisdom has also evolved. My brother doesn't have a college degree compared with my eldest sister—yet both enjoy a very comfortable financial life, with businesses to boot. It's not a black and white world. Bottomline, education and a sweet living situation are still good standards to achieve in life. I will still bat for those. There is not way to intellectualize or philosophize or redefine the basic exigencies of life. Education is school, ownership of a house. Gut reality.
Moreover, what moves my family and kinship, as I always brag, is no one is left in the gutters or in the hole. We rally as a family. No one fails because such a failure will be pulled out of the murk and so we all party as one. Sometimes my daughter puts so much weight on her heart and shoulder, just like when I was her age, but I know she will overcome. She knows how to have fun and dance with it. She organizes our annual family Christmas reunion. It's just that, like me, after the party—she doesn't waste time hangin' out in a bar for hours getting drunk or be contained and saddened by being single or lonely. It's all good. Life is a blessing. We are never lonely—wherever part of the universe we choose to spend an episode or two of our life's journey.
My daughter ends her email with, “I'm at peace.” That's what matters. That's all a father needs to hear.
IN America, I have learned to fit in and “fit out” through the years. When asked, “Where you from?” The auto-response is always, “Asheville.” Usually there's a follow-up query of course. So I courteously reply—then I ask the same based on the person's last name. German. Irish. Italian. Welsh. Polish. French etc. Yet I like it better, 16 years ago, when I first got here in the mountain than these days. Locals asked me where I came from—saying Philippines is all about sharing cultures. Simple and sweet.
These days, so-called educated (transplants) people has a problem when I say the Philippines is called the Pearl of the Orient or maybe I eat bizarre food or Catholics back home subjugate their women, how do we cook our chicken etc etcetera. Worse, since I emanated from a religious culture, we voted Trump? (No that Mr Trump is that bad either.) Offensive. Felt like someone's telling me he/she is better than me. With Southern locals, it was easy—I eat the funnel cake and humongous turkey leg and share PBRs and I cook my chicken pork adobo and prepare cucumber vinegar salad. And the clincher? Lynyrd Skynyrd. Simple and sweet.
