It is simply disgusting how the President and the rest of the San Miguel Corporation (SMC)-lead oligarchy have dealt with the public backlash on the issue of the Sumilao farmers, who have marched all they way from Bukidnon in Mindanao to demand that their land be given back to them. What a load of crap. It’s all typical and hypocritical media blitz about social justice, economic and financial prospects of corporate-owned cattle ranches, pineapple plantations and piggeries etc. and how the government cares for the underprivileged and exploited. I hope people don’t keep buying it.

The plight of the farmers in Sumilao is not an isolated case. It’s a classic example of how lopsided in favor of this nation’s landlords and oligarchs our ‘democratic’ government’s land reform program truly is. It’s a classic example of how the wealthy landlords have circumvented land redistribution through the use of land conversions and reclassification schemes and worse, used various forms of aggression against peasant beneficiaries; and how our government, controlled largely by the people of the same wealthy class, have connived to maintain the status quo.

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Let me get this off my blog checklist once and for all. Our frat’s 89th anniversary was what occupied most of my time the past months and a few weeks. Days of no-sleep, hours of prodwork like tagging three thousand stems of roses and cooking 15 kilos of pasta in under three hours. Haha. Oh boy. Despite limited funds and manpower at times, we were able to pull everything off.

After our free film screening of Tulad ng Dati, we held a bloodletting contest last November 22 and 23. In cooperation with the Philippine Red Cross, we sought to gather teams in UP Diliman to best each other by donating the most amount of blood based on the number of donors. After two days, a team of university security personnel won the contest with almost a dozen blood donors.

The Saturday right after, November 24, we held a Gawad Kalinga build with UP Gawad Kalinga at a GK site in Brgy. Central in Quezon City. It was my first time to participate in a Gawad Kalinga activity. Though I dislike how some people in the university use it to swipe at campus activism or use it as an excuse or alternative for mass mobilizations for political and social change, this Gawad Kalinga build was particularly enlightening in some ways. It felt futile and inefficient at times–the human chain and the passing around of sandbags despite the availability of wheelbarrows–but then I realized it’s the symbolic act of cooperation that’s most important. Gawad Kalinga for some, exists, after all, as a venue for an erstwhile apathetic middle class to feel like they’re doing something to change society without getting inconveniently political.

The Sunday after, we spent all night till the wee hours of Monday morning preparing three thousand stems of pink roses for our traditional Day of Roses on November 26. Despite an utter lack of sleep, we spent the entire Monday giving flowers to the girls of UP Diliman while serenading them with some songs. Hehe.

And it doesn’t stop here. I shall continue a chronicle of our events in another blog entry.

When I told my mom that I was going to try out law school and take the law aptitude exam in UP, she let out a sigh of relief as if one of her secret lifelong prayers have been answered. True enough, even if my parents always claim that they support me in my choices, whatever they are, I always felt like they didn’t feel quite confident that I’d be professionally or economically secure with BA Film & Audio-Visual Communication, my current undergraduate course. We all know parents mean well when they think about their children’s financial and professional security in their college choices, but it really wasn’t my primary concern when I was choosing my course.

Whenever I tell some relatives and even my elementary and high school teachers about my course, I always sense a tinge of disappointment behind their remarks of approval, if ever they give one. Sometimes, they would even candidly ask me, in a demeaning tone, WHY?

Indeed, I have come to the point, a few months before I finally graduate from this course, that I’m asking myself the same question. And it surprises me how difficult it is for me to provide myself the answers. After almost four years, I don’t see myself as the production manager or the director or even the production assistant I tried to imagine myself when I was a freshman. I don’t know. Perhaps this lack of enthusiasm is a fleeting thing. I may eventually find myself in this field of media after all. Who knows?

I’m shooting my thesis, a short film, in a few months, but I’m honestly not as eager or as excited about it as my passionate co-student filmmaker friends.

By the way, yes, to your right is my excessively retouched graduation picture. It looks so aggressively edited by the photography studio that took care of our pictures that even the facial lines that define my smile are gone. Tsk. Mainstream excessive photo editing has got to stop. I didn’t even ask them to edit anything.

Whenever I don’t get to blog for a long time, and the more things that happen in my daily life that I haven’t blogged about, the heavier a certain feeling of baggage becomes for me. It’s like, as long as I don’t blog certain events, I can’t get it off my chest hence it’s quite a drag to move on without putting a definite closure by writing it down in an online chronicle. I’ve been blogging my life for more than seven years, and perhaps that length of time has made me feel like if I don’t blog something, it’s as good as forgotten. Unless of course, the experience is something life-changing or extraordinary enough that it shall forever be kept in my consciousness even if I don’t blog about it. Say, something like, my fraternity initiations. Hehe.

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“Dissent without action is consent.”

I was reminded of this when I came across Arbet Bernardo’s blog. This was one of the things Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim expressed during the recent standoff that happened in Makati a few days ago.

As a comment to the entry, Jhay Rocas had this to say, “It has the same meaning with this anecdote: If you see an elephant stepping down on a mouse’s tail, and the mouse cries out to you for help. If you say that you don’t want to get involved and would like to stay neutral, your neutrality doesn’t help the oppressed mouse. It helps the elephant!” to which I offered affirmation with a quote, “Silence and neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed.”

As a reply to another comment here in my blog, I said, “Though I don’t condone the method they used to undertake their ‘rebellion’, may I remind you that the President has quelled all legal and ‘peaceful’ venues. Elections? Rigging. Impeachment? Bribes. Investigations? Silence. Executive Orders. Propaganda.

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