Carnage
This is a story about death in a place they call the Promised Land, where the heat punches with a sweaty fist, and a crescent moon rises with the Christian sun.
It happened on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where every bridge is a checkpoint manned by young men in fatigues. Esmael Mangudadatu, Buluan vice mayor, threatened with violence, sending his wife Genalyn, his sister, his nieces and his lawyers to file his certificate of candidacy because he believed women would be safe. Esmael Mangudadatu, inviting a pack of journalists to cover the event, because he believed his family would be safe where the media were. Esmael Mangudadatu, answering the last phone call from a wife who told him they had been stopped by Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr.’s private army.
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March to mayhem
It is November in Manila, days before the deadline for filing candidacies. On Monday, Senate President Pro Tempore Jinggoy Estrada with 11 other senators signed Resolution 1472 absolving Sen. Manuel Villar Jr. of ethical charges in connection with the C-5 Road extension project, long before a committee report was officially released by the Senate.
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So sayeth the Comelec
Nicodemo T. Ferrer is a pillar of the community. Man of faith, Knight of Columbus, former dean of the Virgen Milagrosa University Foundation, Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister for Our Lady of the Purification Parish, a man whose 2006 appointment into the Commission on Elections came with his pledge to “restore and improve” the public image of the Commission on Elections—the same man of God whose bigoted morality has brought Manila back to the medieval.
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Jesus in Yellow
The grass is yellow outside the gates of Hacienda Luisita. Jesus walked here once.
His father watched him die, almost five years to this day. Nov. 16 was when close to 15,000 tenants gathered to protest their treatment under the Cojuanco-owned Hacienda Luisita. Dispersal units charged with a thousand soldiers in full battle gear. The Northern Command numbered over five hundred. Stones and shouts, water cannons, tanks that barreled into gates. It was three in the afternoon. The sun burned yellow. The father heard it first: rifle cracks, a barrage of bullets punching through bodies. Jesus died that day, one of seven reported union deaths. They tell me there are more whose names were never reported.
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Chiz Escudero 2010
The popularity of Francis Joseph Guevara Escudero, now senator of the republic and possible presidential aspirant for 2010, has been attributed to many things. Some claim it is his eloquence. Many have marveled at his ability to stretch a single thought into a 20-minute social commentary, dripping with synonyms and similes, delivered with the same deadpan efficiency of a call center agent explaining to the 38th caller just why their electricity went off in the storm. Others claim it is his looks, this tall lean man in shirtsleeves surrounded by colleagues carting potbellies in embroidered pineapple silk shirts. According to his personal website, his “rise into the nation’s consciousness” is nothing less than “meteoric.” He is described as “consistently leading surveys as the most trusted official of the land,” and his various distinctions—including the recent “Most Admired TV Personality” in 2008—proves “he has not gone unnoticed.”
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The Aquino son
WE ARE told to wear yellow for Benigno Aquino III. Tie a yellow ribbon, wear a yellow shirt, remember the woman in glasses, remember the man in the bloodied white suit. Show him that you are behind him, he says, and he will stand for you.
He is aware that some have raised issues of his inexperience. “Some said I’m not yet ripe for the picking.”
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In the court of the crimson king
When the doors open, the chatter stops, and the people rise as a body. There is silence as he strides up to the dais, grave-faced and sober-eyed. In this temple he is high priest, his is the way, the truth, and the light. He does not understand, however, that they do not rise only because he is Reynato Puno, champion of human rights, hero of the press, the anointed son of Holy Mother Church. They stand because of the dark robe that falls in heavy folds to his feet, because of the gavel he carries, because of the soaring ceilings, because of the compulsion of decades of other men and women rising to the idea of a judge, the man of unimpeachable character who has risen above all men to preside as the Chief Justice.
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David’s choice
In the valley of Elah, twicea day for 40 days, Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, challenged the Israelites to send out their champion and decide the battle in single combat. The Israelites were afraid – except for one boy. David, son of Jesse, who refused his brother Saul’s armor and took only a sling and five stones taken from a brook.
And so the battle: the towering Goliath, armor glinting in the sunlight, David with his staff and sling. There was taunting, and the names of gods were thrown as curses, and David struck Goliath with a stone from his sling. The Philistine fell, and young David cut off the Philistine’s head. At Goliath’s death, “the troops of Israel and Judah rose up with a shout and pursued the Philistines as far as Gath and the gates of Ekron.”
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Jose Melo’s nightmare
SOME call it a youth revolution, the impulse to stand up and be counted in the year before the 2010 elections. The “Register and Vote” campaign is not the first of its kind, there have been many others, but it is arguably one of the most star-studded. The campaign was launched with a rock-concert-rally on May 14 in the depressed urban area of Barangay Tatalon, Quezon City. Over 1,000 people attended the event, whose musical showcase had crooners Cooky Chua and Luke Mijares and bands Kamikaze and MYMP romancing the half-barefoot residents of clapboard and tin homes in the village where Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan first won as councilor at the age of 23.
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The truths every Filipino should know…
Today, I will write a manifesto. I’d like to correct the perception that my generation is apathetic to the state of the nation. Issues of policy, of poverty, of the national economy—all these are supposedly beyond the scope of our interest. It is not true, but such is our inexperience that we look toward the obvious superiority of our elders to determine how to go about our lives, to set our moral and ethical standards, to fix upon our minds the path of truth and virtue in a society in constant battle with sin.
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