Accents
Again, I’m leaving on a jet plane (3)
Oakland, California, Sept. 19—City Corporate Inn CEO Gloria S. Fernandez asked where I get ideas for the articles I write. In our brief stay at the hotel, she read my columns and got curious. Ideas? Things are all around us out of which an idea surfaces to be fleshed out in words from one’s vantage point—just one person’s way of looking at things. Poets, for instance, look at the commonplace in rich metaphors. Sample what I’ve committed to memory from high school English, a stanza from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence: To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.
I continue with the gems (there I go again!) culled from previous columns, hoping that these will create ripples in the mighty ocean of your mind.
Cash from clutter
Us in the Third World make do with the “ukay-ukay” for most of our needs, especially apparel. Never mind if we don’t get that dress first-hand. Not an issue to die for. There are more important things in life to stand and struggle for, as my mother used to say. So, don’t sweat the peripheries in life. Just enjoy the bargains you make in the garage sale.
Garage sale presents a classic example how one man’s trash could be another man’s treasure. Useless to one, useful to another. In politics, one man’s friend is another man’s enemy. Rather an unlikely figure of speech to use here, but I’ll let it go considering the cha-cha (charter change) maneuvers that never die in the beloved country. What’s good for the goose, ain’t good for the gander. What’s the loud-barking lapdog of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo but a lowlife in the opposite camp. What is black to Juan is white to Pedro. And so it goes…
State of the Nation aglow in the eyes of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
We continue to breathe the impure air, poisoned by questions of legitimacy and credibility of the Malacanang occupant, culpable violation of the Constitution, betrayal of public trust, electoral fraud and cover-up (“Hello, Garci”), graft and corruption (Hi, Joc-Joc, the ZTE deal or no deal), torture, desaparecidos, and extrajudicial killings. Pervasive poverty and hunger. SONA ni Ate Glo? Or the unSONA of the street parliamentarians.
Invocation delivered in the Bayanihan Association of Northern California (B.A.N.C.) Philippines Independence Day celebrations
Let us put ourselves in the presence of the Supreme Being—Yahweh, Allah, Jesus Christ, the Divine, the Omnipotent, give a holy name—and it would be so all right.
Even us our Association offers this rich Filipino culture of songs and dances and cuisine on this the One-hundred eleventh Anniversary of Philippine Independence, let us not forget the desperate, the dispossessed, the disempowered, “the least of the brethren” in the shacks and slums of our beloved homeland, or in the deprived hinterlands of “Perlas ng Silanganan.” (To be continued on Monday)