Observer Editorial, Sept 2010

RIGHT TO VOTE—

VOTE RIGHT

We are headed to the primary elections that will eventually lead us to another, more final one in the next two months. The finality of the one that comes after the primary is that we will be deciding whom to put to office from a list of those we have selected.

While this process is clear, the procedure in keeping with what the phrase ‘the right to vote’ means, the results might not necessarily translate to what we need at this time.

What we need in this time of widespread recession and the loss of hope resulting from this widespread recession are competent leaders who concretely understand where we are and who know how to lead us get out of this mess that has become our lot in the last two years or so.

What we need are leaders who can tell us how to draw up a vision again, one of the future, a vision that includes as a marker the continuing increase of the number of middles class Americans and not the slide of this number to a level that reveals a deep divide between those who have so much and the majority that has so little.

We need leaders who are not only good with words—we need the words that can heal our wounded hearts and minds at this time—but also leaders who are also good with how these words are translated into action, leaders therefore who can tell us exactly where do we begin to start walking again in order to pursue the Promised Land, a pursuit that is not empty but with substance.

This is the reason why the right to vote comes always with a correlative: the duty to vote.

In this duty to vote is the responsibility in our hands—the responsibility to assure us that the leaders we elect in the primaries are also the same leaders that will lead us to the light, to hope, and to a new vision for us all.

In the older times, voting was called—we still refer to it sometimes—suffrage.

Suffrage is prayer, petition, and request. It carries with it the weight of ritual and ceremony—and the weight of faith.

It behooves on us then to think again: that even as we take part in the primaries and in the November elections, we are taking part as well in the social ritual for prayer, for petition, for request, and thus, it is necessary that we do the right thing.

Our duty is to educate ourselves to the demands of the choices that we will have to make. These choices are a prelude to the kind of a future our children and we are headed.

Certainly, our prayer is to not falter.

Certainly, our prayer is for this ritual of the elections to come together with our educated, discriminating choices.

We cannot fail—we ought not to fail in these elections.

For one thing, we can no longer afford the cost of widespread recession and hopelessness.

Editorial/Observer

Sept 2010

Fil-Am History Month 2009

MEMORY AND HISTORY

Linked with the memory of an immigrant people is their capacity to tell their stories of struggle in the land they have come into.

That capacity can only mean the ability to create their own history, not in the way history has been mistakenly understood as the story of the big man, of the one who has become a hero, of the victor who has surpassed all odds.

It is not this triumphal mindset that we want to see in the celebration of the Filipino American History Month each October.

It is not this flag-waving ceremony and ritual that, when devoid of context, will render the celebration hollow, really lacking in the hallowedness that we expect in each rite of remembrance.

It is not this sense of the cold and mushy museum understood in the myopic way that we want for each October that we celebrate our history of immigrant people.

For the narrow and misused definition of the museum is only by way of exhibits and exhibits galore of the artifacts of a material culture without the song and sadness, without the context, without the substance—in short, without the stories.

When we miss the spirit of celebration, what we have in the end is the assault of forgetting, the assault eventually rendering us unable to see the connection between these artifacts of our life and the songs and sorrows of those who, with the inspired energy of their hands, formed these artifacts they gathered from the bowels of the earth.

It is not this kind of fossilization of memory that should define our celebration but our ability to courageously sing of the promise of life and to recite the sorrows of remembering what could have been.

For even as each October we do the obligatory recollection of some greatness we truly deserve, some greatness possessed by our people, we must continue to put before us the fact that so many things have yet to be done to make our Filipino American History Month relevant because the celebration strikes at the familiar and not the foreign, the welcoming and not the aggressively hostile, and the fair sense of inclusion and not exclusion.

We need to tell our stories—and we know there are a lot.

We need to tell our stories as immigrants—as Filipino Americans—because if we fail to do that, nobody will, and if we are not going to start doing it now, we will never be able find the right time to begin doing it.

For in the telling of our own stories, we will get to reflect on what have we have been able to achieve despite the difficult circumstances we went through and which we are still going through.

For in the telling of our stories, we will get to name our pains and joys—and in our naming them, they become part of the dynamic of our communal remembrance.

For in the telling of our stories, we will get to affirm one thing: that stories, in the end, are all we are as immigrants in this land.

It is these same stories—these stories that we all are—that will spell the difference between our coming to terms with our leaving the homeland and our arriving here in this land of our dreams, the very land that has become the new homeland of the next generation of Filipino Americans.

A S Agcaoili/Observer Editorial/Oct 2009

Observer Editorial-May 2009

 

May and Memory-Making

 

There is so much in the making of memories and in the telling of truth in relation to that moral act of memory.

 

For one, our stories, the ones that live for all time, are grounded on that capacity of memory to keep those that matter to us as peoples, as communities, as narrators.

 

They say that we are all stories and that if we are not stories, we are nothing.

 

And in this May of our recession-filled lives, there is nothing grander, there is nothing more sublime, there is nothing more redeeming than our ethical engagement with truth-telling and memory-making in that delicate dance we call ‘story-making’.

 

For the Filipino community in Hawai’i—and by extension, in the diaspora—the month of May is a riot of fiestas and flower offerings for the many religious rituals that give reason for the diasporic communities to gather and re-gather in celebration and collective reminiscing of the homeland.

 

In more ways than one, the religious, such as the Flores de Mayo festival, comes as an excuse to gather and gawk at the spectacle of ternos and tiaras that both glitter in the sun and give some measure of success for the wearers.

 

The month of May becomes an occasion of prayer, too, what with the santos going around as was done in the Philippines in the past when diaspora was not yet in the lexicon of everyday life of Filipinos and when leaving the homeland, whether forced or voluntary, was some form of punishment as it was also a form of banishment to the strange and the unfamiliar, to the alienating and the foreign, and to that relentless rite of rooting an re-rooting in a land not your own.

 

While we admit that the fiestas that we stage in our diasporic communities are sometimes far better in administration and management than the ones we have back in the homeland—and far better sometimes in terms of its popular cultural appeal, what with popular singers and popular television personalities coming to entertain and thus, coming to enthrall and make us forget in many ways the tragedy of everyday life in the home country and in the adoptive land—these fiestas need rethinking as they should be.

 

For unless they tell us of our duty to truth-telling particularly of that broad story of why many peoples of the Philippine have left the homeland to eke it our in other places, these fiestas will fall flat in the general scheme of things, and will end up as empty exercise of a stage show whose meaning lasts only while the spectacle lasts.

 

For unless these myriad of activities that highlight Philippine popular culture become themselves instruments of consciousness that make us see and hear and feel and sense and touch critically of what we need to understand about our life as a collective, in the Philippines and in the diaspora, what we do will simply turn out to be one of those endless spectacles that will leave us empty-handed in the end.

 

Because what we need really are cultural instruments and programs that make us remember our responsibility to tell the truth of our being members of the collective in light of our engaging and rich diversity, in light of our need to preserve the memory that will make us celebrate both our sameness and our difference—and in Hawai’i and in the diaspora, our triumphs against all odds, with both triumphs and odds equally recognized, remembered, named.

 

For truth-telling ought to be part of our commitment to our collective story.

 

For memory-making ought to make us morally engaged with our history.

 

Both truth-telling and memory-making are intricate parts of the same act of telling who we are as a people across time.

Published, Observer, May 2009

Hon, HI

 

 

Observer Editorial

RENEWAL

 

We begin the New Year with a note of hope.

 

We begin it as well with the commitment that this hope that resides in us will continue to spring eternal and that, unlike the challenges that we had to contend with last year, it will not push us against the wall.

 

For in these difficult circumstances we are in, this sense of hope is what makes sense to the already senseless events and news and realities that bombard us each day, deadening our sense of the morrow, and numbing us to become unaware that there is grace in life, however inchoate this grace is insofar us our set of expectations is concerned.

 

The whole gamut of meanings that we can draw up as we transition to the new year is encapsulated in that very sense of hope that we keep deep in our heart and soul: each of us, with that sense always the anchor upon which we secure our commitment to struggle for something better, something truer, something more beautiful even as we become witnesses to the opposite of what we least want to see.

 

The times are dire.

 

The times are difficult, very difficult.

 

The times of our lives are not memorable in the sense of their being joyous, as they should be, as we expect them to be, as we want them to be.

 

The times of our going through the motions of living life everyday under the threat of foreclosures and recession and job losses and all other trying circumstances are not what we Filipino Americans came to America for.

 

Certainly, we were expecting something grander, something rosier as soon as we took the first step on that plane ride to this country. In that first step was our living and huge dream of making it—as all other people in the past, remote and immediate, have dreamed.

 

But herein comes the double-edged sword threatening our existence, and threatening the life of our dreams.

 

Here is where the need for us to hold on to that dream so that it becomes immediate, urgent.

 

Here is where our capacity for the testing of our mettle comes to the rescue, with our inner force from our ability to hope for something better the proof of that capacity.

 

Whoever says that joy is only defined by our being under the warm and bright sun?

 

Joy is also dancing in the rain, and committing to memory each moment of that act of dancing—our own dancing—in the rain.

 

This New Year then requires a renewal on our part, one from our relentless act of hoping, one from our ability to dance in the rain, and enjoy that dance of our life.

 

We wish you the kindness and blessing of the times. 

 

We wish you a blessed renewal the new times offer. 

A. Solver Agcaoili

Fil-Am Observer Editorial

Hon, HI/Jan 2009