Just as some golf clubs are known for their "forgiveness", we Filipinos have to be one of the most forgiving people anywhere. It takes a lot of heat to make us reach our boiling point. This is definitely not a bad national quality, it only allows us to be abused rather easily. Case in point is the rally that was scheduled to take place today. Half a million people were expected to join and about 20 thousand showed. Granted that our hardworking congressmen completely turned around from their far from subtle efforts to perpetuate themselves in power, I still expected a little more output from the perennially oppressed.

Now even the president has joined the church's call for "character change" in lieu of charter change. These politicians need to realize that they have become part of the problem. I guess it does take a certain amount of grace however, to be able to pause and think and view one's condition from a different perspective. All the more difficult if you've been immersed in politics all your life.

I am very proud of the Catholic Church. It is spearheading efforts to make government employees and elected officials to become conscious of their responsibilities towards the people that they should be serving. The Church had been complicit in allowing so many abuses to go unpunished in the past. We would never have been subjugated by martial law if we had a more active and responsible Church. I am glad that the Church was able to learn a lesson from all those many years of injustice.

The local Catholic Church has committed itself to a three-fold program of pastoral action including character building that seeks to form persons of faith and virtue through the ministry of the Word and the Sacraments, Catholic education, through programs of formation and spirituality. "To build the future, we need to deepen our sense of honesty and integrity, service and responsibility, stewardship and solidarity".

The Church is committed to building capacity. Poverty being not only about "not having" but also of "not being able". The Church plans to accomplish this through its various training programs, schools, charitable agencies, religious and lay organizations.

The Church is committed to building community by undoing the ruinous divisiveness in the country that is rooted in a culture "too focused on the good of small social groups". Through formation and education, the Church seeks to "promote at every level of society and Church a spirituality of citizenship, which is a concrete way of living out in our country the fundamental social virtue: solidarity. This spirituality of citizenship fosters a sense of patriotism and of being responsible for our country. It develops Filipinos into becoming active and constructive participants in social and political life. It enables the laity to take their rightful leadership role in the social transformation of the country".

We will see what happens tomorrow.

Unable to post anything new because there was no internet access for 5 days on account of a storm that lashed through the country! Realized how dependent I had become on the internet--from email to the news to travel arrangements to banking and bill paying, I could never have returned physically home to the Philippines without the internet.

But now I am back. I wish I was in Manila so I could take part in a giant indignation rally on Sunday organized by various religious groups to protest the indecent manner in which our congressional representatives are trying to force changes in our constitution. Granted that the constitution can stand a few revisions, ordinary folk here are flabbergasted at the sudden burst of energy that some of our congressmen have exhibited, working late into the early morning hours just so they manage to get their way again.

Entirely forgotten once again are the innumerable poor. As always, political expediency and selfish, narrow self-interests rule the day.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

Blake

Along the way to the airport, or to the golf course, the Shangri-La Hotel, the posh subdivisions you will invariably pass by classic third world slums and whenever the pervasive traffic forces your airconditioned vehicle to a halt, you might be able to take a glimpse of how terrible the living conditions are of so many women and children.

You wonder how long these people have been struggling, whether they have ever even experienced substantial relief, if they still dream of better days. How much dehumanization can these people bear? Yeats wrote "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart".