THE GIVING OF THANKS

A grateful nation can never go wrong in much the same way that a grateful heart will always do what is right and fair.

But even as we celebrate this year’s Day of Thanksgiving—even as we reel away from this national trauma we call economic meltdown that seems to have no end in sight—we have a reason to sit back and think through what has happened to the communities of immigrants in this land, communities that are known for their diversity and difference and yet always on the lookout for what makes them in common.

The Day of Thanksgiving is rooted in the acknowledgement that there is something or someone that knows well than what we know.

The Day of Thanksgiving implicates as well the immigrant history of this country that at times, after the immigrants have settled down and stopped moving, have come to look at the other immigrants from a different lens.

No, this country, on the Day of Thanksgiving and beyond it, must take stock of its investment in movement—in migration—as this is what its energy for growth, creativity, ingenuity, community, and vision comes from.

Without this broader perspective, we lapse into forgetting and this whole idea about sacrifice and honor, as is the case of the sacrifice and honor of the veterans who had to fight a war in our name in order for us to have peace, will become hollow and shallow, empty and meaningless.

One lesson we need to underscore on the Day of Thanksgiving is to keep on with the spirit to insist what needs to be remembered.

Another lesson is to resist the idea that remembrance is a perfunctory act of recalling the past as if this past is a relic of what goodness the past had.

No, we cannot.

History must remain our guide in mapping the future for us all; the future that is well rooted in the past-as-present and in the present-as-future.

We fail to see the continuum of time, we fail to see how necessary is our role to guarantee that someone will remember, someone will make it sure that we all become “a member again” of this vibrant, dynamic, socially responsible community of immigrants.

FAO/NOV 2010/EDITORIAL

Editorial-Observer

Immigration and the Sense of Déjà vu

The sense of déjà vu in the current immigration issue flooding the country, with the Arizona law opening the floodgates, is something that is not only palpable but also disturbing.

Somewhere in this long narrative of immigrant life in this country, some people have not read enough of the travails of those who have decided to come and take part in that pursuit of a grand metaphor—a phrase of an extravagant dream as it appears now in these days of recession—the American Dream.

The narrative evokes a past whose truths, simple and yet difficult, are not easy for the comprehending.

This past suggests to us of Ellis Island, of the quarantine practices for the newcomers, the impoverishments and deprivations of those who could hardly make both ends meet as they began their new life in the new ‘homeland’, the raids of suspected illegal immigrants, and the wrenching social drama involved in deportation proceedings that, sometimes, breaks families apart.

With the crackdown anew, as is the case of what is required in Arizona, and with the method of the crackdown based on mere ‘suspicion’ of being an illegal immigrant, we do not know where all these things will lead us.

We have forgotten one thing: That the United States of America has always been, since time of our founding as a product of a political imaginary, a nation of ‘nations’, and a nation of immigrants.

That sums up our being America, our being the United States, in so many ways.

We have forgotten that we were once visitors, and now that we have become ‘natives’ ourselves by virtue of the long process of ‘nativization’, we are now going to use the iron hand and declare to all and sundry that this America is only for the one who has a legitimate reason to be around here.

No, we are not for the wanton disrespect for the immigration law.

No, we are not here to take side with those who violate the immigration law willfully.

We are here to defend the right of everyone in this country to be safe here and not to be afraid.

We are here to defend the right of everyone to be spared of the fear that is rooted in the idea that when someone suspects you of being an illegal person, you can be questioned ad random, asked for your identification, asked for a proof that you have the right to stay in this country of ‘the brave’ and ‘the free’.

We must remind ourselves that the greatness of America is its practice of democracy, its fundamental respect for human beings, its recognition of diversity.

We must remind ourselves that the greatness of America is that it welcomes our ‘many-ness’, our ‘difference’, our ‘plurality’.

The text of the seal of America sums it all: E pluribus unum: Out of the many, one.

FAO, May 2010

FAO Editorial

THE SPRING OF OUR HOPE

Two important events mark our lives as Americans of Philippines descent this month and the coming months: the health care law, a response to the social justice issue of health care in this country, and the elections that will be held in the Philippines next month.

In both events, we are implicated.

Their implications issue out the need for us to hope for the better, believing that hope is one spring of the soul we can indulge in and we can hold onto even as we get past life’s Fall, with all its connotations.

We are still reeling from all the literal hardships that have come to visit us even in this land of prosperity and dream.

We are still reeling from the ugly reality that has hit us hard when that American Dream we have been pursuing has suddenly turned unreachable, its pursuit now almost impossible, with less and less of access available to us for us to reimagining it in our mind as in our life and in our daily struggles.

In the homeland, the story is not better off: the images on the streets, the images on the newspapers, the images from the news are a mixed bag of hope and frustration, despair and illusion, virtue and vice.

In so many ways, it seems that this new homeland we have come to, literally and metaphorically, to eke out a life that is something more colorful and better and grander, has become elusive at best.

In so many ways, it seems that the homeland we left behind has not learned to molt into a republic of vision, preferring instead to remain a republic of sorrows and grief and servitude.

The new health care law is a thought in grandiose terms, its intentions marked by a distinct sensitivity to the connection between social justice and health as a public good.

The elections in the Philippines, on the other hand, remains a stage play, with no plot that is clear but a lot of entanglements, with the almost mysterious because open-ended sub-plot lines of political promises.

And there is much misery too: the roads claim the dead, in the deep of the night as in the sunlight clarity of daytime.

Two entanglements, these, and we watch from the sidelines, and we can only watch from the sidelines, kibitzing as much as we can, as we are rendered spectators in all these spectacles that assault us each day.

How do we move on past these bombshells of the everyday is a question that begs an honest response, a wideness of vision, and a critical engagement with that conversation that could show us the way out of these traps that are not of our own making.

It is our obligation to ask this question—and beg for an answer, or answers.

Because our obligation is not only to the present but to the future as well, in much the same that our obligation is not only to the current season, but also to the one that comes after.

Especially in this time of Spring, when the sunshine welcomes us in its glory and the thought of coming to life again from the Fall of “the falling of leaves” and the “hibernation of the universe” and the “dormancy of the colors of flowers” becomes a thought that ignites in us some reasons to look forward to the Summer of warmth and gaiety and joy.

It is resurrection told anew: it is resurrection in life as in the need to hope for something better especially when the debates in the health care law will come from everywhere and the dark and dreary dramaturgy in Philippine politics will confuse us some more.

“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope,” so says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

We believe him.

We need to give reason to the next generation of Philippine Americans to hope, in all the seasons of our life, in this season of Spring or in the coming Summer, or in this time of the Christian narrative of resurrection they call Easter.

Happy Easter to all!


FAO. April 2010

BREAKING THE FAST, HOLDING ON TO HOPE

The cuaresma, that inheritance from our Spanish past, speaks of forty days of fasting in anticipation of logical end of the mystery of suffering, death, and resurrection.

It is a powerful narrative, this, as it imbued the spirit of the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of the Philippines, seizing the trope by stripping the Christian story of its myth and remaking a new myth for national redemption.

This narrative is seen everywhere even as we speak of wars and destruction all over, this last one both man-made and by force majeure.

Today is the season of trials, in this land of Filipino immigrants, in the homeland, and in other places.

Today is the season of trials for so many people visited by climatic upheavals and social tornados.

Today is the season of suffering—and this suffering is untold, testing our limits, placing us in extraordinary circumstances and making us respond to these circumstances in extraordinary ways.

We are only obligated to do the ordinary things, ethicists tell us.

We are not obligated to do the extraordinary things by employing extraordinary means, the ethicists remind us too.

But in this time of want and human needing, the stories of our lives assume a new form and shape and force us to take stock of what we have got.

Indeed, it is true: life is a difficult text.

And this difficult text which is life itself finds itself in the challenges of the everyday in the Philippines come election time, in the United States as we reel from the consequences of recession with job losses all over the land, in so many parts of Africa where discord and disease and terrorism become the counter-narrative to human decency and self-respect, and in parts of Asia where poverty is not a foreign country.

The lesson of this narrative of the Lenten Season is quite simple: we see the parallelism in the mystery of hoping after going through a lot.

That after suffering comes grace in the recognition that somewhere, somewhere, something good can come out of this.

That after death comes with it the ultimate life lesson that everything comes to an end, that the finitude of human life need not end in the passing of an individual life but in the eternity of one’s good deeds.

That resurrection—that coming into life again—is hope in its bountiful eternity, in its fecund possibilities.

Comes the fasting: the need to go through the ceremonies of suffering and dying in its most literal and metaphorical form.

But comes the breaking of the fast as well in order to celebrate once more what life is all about, what hope is in real terms.

Resurrection—or that promise of one, indeed, is our key to hoping.

And with hope, we will find the energy to cope—and cope well.

We live in interesting because difficult times, but we shall overcome.

The song’s promise is true. This is grace coming full circle—and it is for us.



Editorial, FAO, March 2010

Tactical Articulations

The February of our collective lives is a continuum of what we have left off last year, with the inflation of our hope for the better because of forces that are largely not within our control.

There is so much of these right now, in the Philippines and elsewhere, and the tragedies that visit those who do not have the capacity to bear them seem to be increasing in number: the Ampatuan massacre in the homeland, the whole scale devastation in Port-au-Prince, the relentless terrorist bombings in Baghdad and in Kabul, and the foiled attempt at another airplane high jacking in the United States.

We are living in interesting times, indeed, so the saying goes.

And these times are difficult times, strange too, leaving us with not so much to hold onto even as we try to keep looking for that proverbial dawn light streaking through the forests and valleys and plains and mountains of our already sundered, blighted, troubled lives.

It is easy to fall into the cracks in these especially difficult circumstances marking our days, with the cracks creating gaping holes that are ever ready to swallow us whole and entire.

It is easy to lose sight of the promise of the future when so much of the tragic leaves us unable to re-gather our thoughts, reenergize our minds, and replenish our already dissipated sense of self-worth.

Even as we are greeted by a continuing sense of the absurd in this globalized world, with the global recession providing the engine for a freefall that has given rise to some other freefalls in employment and our capabilities to fend for ourselves and to take care of our families, we are here, and truly so, and our presence has become some form of active witnessing to what possibilities are still there in this vast world of interesting human experiences.

No, we cannot afford to fall on the wayside.

No, we cannot afford to go haywire.

No, we cannot afford to turn our back to the challenges of the present, however terrifying and surprising these challenges are.

What we need is some form of tactic to articulate what we have got.

What we need is to take back our ability to name that which we have got.

What we need is to articulate our pains, articulate our tragedies, articulate the present, and in the process of this tactical articulation, we will soon realize that yes, indeed, we have a way of seeing the whole thing in way that can be revelatory of what we can do—of what we, in fact, have before us: our lives, our present, our being around, our being in the midst of the here-and-now, in the midst of these things, in the midst of the events that open up new life lessons for us.

There is that sense of urgency in looking at the positives and to tactically articulate them so that we can have some reference points even as we try to get by despite all these troubles.

There is that immediacy of turning the ugly experience into something meaningful, beautiful, and truthful even if admittedly it is raw.

For the beautiful life—as in the promise of a faithful love which we celebrate this month—does not come as a polished, finished product but is always ongoing, always subject to the vagaries of moments, of pains, of histories, of joys, of hopes.

The truly beautiful life is, in the beginning, always rough.

Holding all other things equal, there ought to be one thing that renders life worth living: our commitment to loving and loving fully, meaningfully, humanely.

And this love is not only the romantic kind but includes the courageous confrontation of all that that hinders the deployment of love in order to charm the lover.


FAO, Feb 2010