Some Thoughts on the Bangsamoro

The Bangsamoro is a National Initiative: It is therefore, the concern of all Filipino citizens. It is an effort to evolve the ARMM and learn from its lessons - and make it work.

Mindanao is endowed with much abundance. But it is run like a frontier - 'tis a place ever awash in a sea of uncertainty, its communities trapped between the ebbing and flowing tides of random sky and restless earth - never seeming to be able to change to master change.

But the Island of Mindanao does not constitute our Southernmost frontier, in fact, it is a center of gravity of our Republic - it owns one of the three Foundation Stars that form our National sufficiency.

What is it that make us sufficient as a Nation?

Our Republic is not random nor blind. Neither is the Peace that it promises empty.

Our Republic is a shelter of Peace. Its labor with ours, as a Nation across our generations, is to constantly ensure that the sovereign will of our people rise above random sky and conquer restless earth.

To be sufficient as a sovereign and free people is to be capable of sustaining this Peace. Not as a product of  strings of random events, the whim of tyrants, or an obscure fate but as the sum of our free and independent choices.

Indeed, this ability to ponder "what we are" (being) and "who we are" (becoming) came at a high cost in personal sacrifice and heroic dedication. Let us always remember - to Remember them - and seek to know them by their names.

We have suffered too much indeed in our struggle for self-determination to abandon our common destiny. The Bangsamoro is a result of this realization. It is a deliberate National effort to re-establish a meaningful, durable Peace in Mindanao.

AND is one of the many processes now taking place - in our hearts and minds - to take back from the brink - the soul of our Country and the spirit of our Republic center. It is a process that along with (1) the National Rebuild in the Visayas, (2) the difficult fight against Corruption in Luzon, (3) the labor to balance the ecological promise of Palawan with our Energy needs and stabilize our western frontier constitute the four main areas - under the Eternal vigilance of Almighty God - wherein this Peace is likewise being advanced - on a broad front - all across our Nation.

PEACE which is not an absence of conflict but a return to the Memory - of what we are - and - of who we are - that we are a "we" and that as a "we", we have belonged forever. Peace which overturns War - that the life of our people may find rest - and the enemies of our Peace find only restlessness. Peace which is the truth of something real to love, something real to defend with a zeal that can never be lost or misplaced.

For we can no longer allow ourselves to be divided by the idols of chance or the gods of ignorance. For this Nation answers to God alone and this House (Republic) serves the LORD, the one Sovereign of all Nations, above and beyond all things, seen and unseen.

- selah -

The one constant that may be presumed from the nature of frontier areas are that they are always peripheral to the politics of the central government - this to our Republic represents a problem of perspective. In the political arena, this tragically mistaken sense have denied from many of our common generations, the abundance of Mindanao, spawning policies and laws self-prejudicial to the well-being of our Republic and detrimental to the common weal of our being as a National whole - past, present, and forever.

This near-sighted politics of the frontier exists as a constant challenge to competent Ambassadorship - for what is peripheral to the National consciousness and what is central to the International consciousness are almost always in need of political synchronicity as well as human reciprocity - and so as a rule, good Ambassadors are always good managers of frontier politics - from the center - transforming them in accordance with specific foreign policy goals and specified state interests.

And most certainly, Mindanao does not require an Ambassador from Luzon. What we need to do is to draw Mindanao into the Republic center - where the Island, its peoples, and its star rightfully belongs - equally - with Luzon and the Visayas. We can not do this without winning the Peace in Mindanao for we can not win back to our Republic center that vital Foundation Star by remaining with the rule of War.

- selah -

As a direct result of a misguided perspective, the Island is trapped in poverty. Its people never knowing the enabling peace of our Republic sky and the life of its communities never knowing the empowering Good will of our Nationhood.

Poverty is the lot of Man and the labor of the Nations is to overcome it. We are here to work to be happy and be free to be wealthy. Simply put, the labor of our coming together as a Nation upon this world is to become rich - both - in the more lasting spiritual as well as in the more immediate material (or temporal) sense.

Our Republic exists not only to establish Peace, but to overcome poverty. But not artificial poverty. For we can not become fully established - as a Nation - in the sovereign labor of obtaining from Heaven - in behalf of the Earth, our legacy of Justice and the heritage of our National Wealth - without Peace among ourselves.

Coincidentally, the former secessionist spirit of both the MNLF and the MILF were fed by this problem of perspective. Because this problem - compounded by increasingly provincial politics - espoused a sense of inequality that is uncomfortable in a Republic.

It is uncomfortable because we were already established as a Nation before God. Else, we would feel no compunction. It is uncomfortable to us as a Nation because it is unjust before God and inhuman before the Memory of our people.

It is uncomfortable to the point of bitterness and the shedding of so much blood and tears. Both factions have heretofore, according to all our understanding - repudiated this separatist mission. Because now we are pursuing a common mission of Peace - together this time - in the Bangsamoro vision.

The fact that there are deep and ancient divisions between the two great Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam that together shape the living culture of our Republic - in the past - often did nothing to heal all those simmering political rifts, many a time adding only to the heat of those many fires that in the darkness consume instead of shedding more of the light that in the darkness leads out into the Truth. And so we have fought among ourselves to dismiss and disown the Truth for so long...

Until this new time, until this new season under heaven...

Indeed, these present days - it would be a sin not to recognize the fact that we can, as a Nation - accomplish nothing further by being divided in our hearts and in Mindanao we may find the main epicenter of this division - this fragmentation in our soul of Country. (The Visayas may feel it too, to a lesser extent - but at large, we are faced with a different set of challenges to win for ourselves that Star).

And it can all be explained by the fact that we have not done enough to draw Mindanao to the center of our Republic and address this fundamental sense of inequality that leaves so many of the least and littlest among our peoples in the shadow - apart from the light of our three stars, and away from the reach of our one sun.

To become sufficient in our Nationhood, we must in spirit - become one people - to become this, as our 1987 Constitution does not include within it, a deeper reflection on the spirit and the character of our citizenship (as it relates to the fundamental natures of our democracy and of our Republic), we must come to a deeper REALIZATION in ourselves of the spirit and character of our citizenship - one with another.

AND we are, as a Nation, the most sufficient when we do our utmost for God and Country - when we seek the good, know the good, and do the good - and to be citizens not unlike each other in this way.

None of us is a Filipino citizen unless one accepts this basic equality - to do unto each other - equal Justice before God - through our one Republic undertaking of Country - and to fear no evil - by virtue of a common civic spirit.

This common civic spirit binds us deeper than blood ties and liberates us from tribal limitations that we may - as citizens of creation - come to know greater freedoms.

These bonds of citizenship are what makes us a cohesive democratic society - it is this fundamental equality as citizens that allow us to endure and in freedom prevail.

BUT what make us truly a Republic is the constancy with which we learn to freely and humanly live out this sufficiency to allow us - with every cycle of our generations - to ascend the way of our Maturity and obtain from the Truth its fullness - in the all of us - for the All of us.

- selah -

Those three stars on Old Defiant represent to us - our being - as a Nation, and its relationship to our sun represents - our becoming - in our Republic.

Before God - at every time and place, all Filipinos true to our Memory profess this as truth - that before the LORD and the assembly of the Nations before God in Eternity - we receive freely in our souls - this being - and - this becoming - as citizens not unlike to each other.

AND our sun is the symbol of the unconquerable Dream of freedom (in God and through God's Country) within which every single Filipino dream of happiness is to be forever possessed in its golden pursuit.

This is our basic equality as citizens before God and its fundamental activity is - to seek to be good, to know to be good and to do what is good - to proceed from Benignity to establish - a dominion of Justice upon our souls - and the rule of Law upon our soil - and the realms of Sacred Life preserve upon this Earth - and to make it all "very good" before the LORD - and on each other's behalf - through His Peace - and in Good will of our common humanity - forever as Nations - of the one Family of the Nations of the Children of Mankind.
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20110409

Sources of Poverty

I have often meditated on the problem of poverty.

We are mistaken who should believe that the problem of widespread poverty in the Philippines is a purely material phenomenon.

We can not make the poor rich through purely external means. So those traditional economic indicators of a nation's wealth (or lack thereof) are only indicative of a part of the process and certainly not the whole.

We can not completely rely on what other economies think, well-meaning though they are, about our own economy because the roots of our national destiny is planted not on the soil of their land nor is the will of our nationhood established upon the soul of their experience as a people.

Surely, we can not look at a happy, smiling picture of another nation and say to ourselves it is our own without deceiving ourselves. For no nation upon the earth is the same.

Though we are all allied to each other by blood and covenant, each of us - each nation - is as distinct as individual human beings are unique.

The progress of any other nation is built upon the backs of its own sweat, blood, and tears.

Each their own journeys in time shaped by their own common experience of a love willingly and freely shed and therefore, shared from among its people across their generations; their peace a result of the reality they have crafted by grace of God from their own belonging together.

We are not any other nation, my fellow Filipino compatriots, we are this nation.

How we see ourselves as ourselves has a very direct as well as distinct bearing on our national destiny.

It might seem to fade in contrast to the obvious reality of the material but we must remember that the roots of our poverty goes deeper than the things of this world - and that is the truth.

And it matters not what name we should call ourselves - we are what we do.

If our understanding of the Angel of the Philippines (or the spirit of the one Filipino people) is wont to teach us anything, it is this:

We could choose to change the name of our nation (not that I am for it, mind you, I am completely against it) but it shall always remain for all our generations that we are who we are inside of ourselves more than what or how or by what name we appear (or make ourselves appear) from the outside.

We shall wear our Flag on the inside before anything else or not at all.

Because time is a flow and once it has gone out of the timeless within our hearts, once time has flowed out of the Sanctuary of the LORD in our every hearts, it is no longer time but consequence and is near impossible to change. (You may refer to the River in Ezekiel 47: 1-12.)

Only a miracle of God can change the course of consequence.

These miracles do happen but if we rely exclusively on them, we tempt the LORD.

For the small and hidden miracles that God works in the hearts of all men are plentiful indeed and more than enough to change the course of our history - we just need to pay attention and hear Him.

Verily, we can not rely purely on externals to solve our problems as a people.

The fact of the matter is poverty is a social justice issue here in the Philippines. It is therefore, a wrong that our society as a whole must make right.

We have to become willing to re-think ourselves again as ourselves - together this time.

People are poor who have accepted the reality of being poor. A nation is defeated who have come to accept its own defeat. No nation can so thoroughly deplete the spirit and exhaust the will of another nation as completely as it can its own self.

We are not a defeated people. We have spirit enough in ourselves to make it right. So we have to educate ourselves aright, above all our youth.

Our history writes that the Philippines was re-discovered in 1521 by a nation not its own.

Let it write further here today that in the third Christian millennium, the Philippines is re-discovered once again by its own nation; by a people wholly its own and a generation called to re-constitute once more our original culture of life and peace.

Carry on with determination, President Noy.

Do not let your faith waver nor the belief in your heart be weakened by those things that oppose your good will and spirit of Country.

Rather, let if flow out of yourself as a mighty river, continue to strive to be the change to inspire us and to work in the nation a remembrance of itself, mabuhay!

We are with you, sir - all the way.

Furthermore, please refer to 20110317, The Roots of the Problem - and consider these also as major sources of poverty.

---<--@

Araw ng Kagitingan

Today we commemorate "Araw ng Kagitingan" or Day of Valour. This day marks the surrender of Bataan and Corregidor during WWII.

Through it, we commemorate the universal spirit of the Filipino profession of arms in general and our friendship with the US Armed Forces in specific.

To do justice to the undying sacrifices of our soldiers and of all soldiers from every nation, we must always remember that there is no such thing as a "just" war, only just causes.

That it is the lives and the actions of just and virtuous military men and women of our nation and of every nation that we shall remember to honor this day, because, my honorable compatriots, in stark contrast to the atrocities of war and the dishonor of war criminals, it is these that redeem.

Military blood ties are permanent.

We ignore the counsel of our own military remembrances at our own peril.

Lest we forget. Lest we forget.

---<--@

A Tragedy in Brazil

I was shocked and saddened by the recent school shooting in Brazil. There are no words enough to express it. I stand in silent sympathy with them.

Let us pray for the victims of this tragedy, feel their hurt, and ask God above for healing for the Brazilian nation.

Let us say peace be upon Brazil, peace be upon the Brazilian people.

---<--@

Another Earthquake in Japan

Japan has done so much for the Philippines. In this time of great stress, let us continue to pray for Japan. May God bless the Japanese nation!

May their indomitable strength of spirit triumph against this test.

Please visit Asia For Japan.

---<--@

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.

Bangon Pilipino

Kaya mahirap ang Pilipinas ay dahil mahirap ang Pilipino. Ang bansa po natin ay naghihirap dahil napakarami pong Pilipinong mahihirap.

Paano po natin malulunasan ito? Babangon po tayo.

Marahil ito ang unang sasagi sa ating mga pag-iisip: Imposible! Nakakahirap po bang isipin ang isang maunlad na Pilipinas? Kapwa ko mga kapatid sa pangako, mas kawawa po tayo kung hindi tayo matututong maniwala muli at bumangon.

Marahil sa lalim ng mga sugat sa puso ng Pilipino ay minarapat ng marami sa atin na tumalikod muna sa mga sakit ng ating Inang Bayan. Ngunit bago na po ang panahon ngayon. Ang lahat po ay hindi na katulad dati. Ang bansa po natin ay nagigising na sa kanyang sarili at marahil ito po ay inyo na ring nararamdaman sa inyong mga puso.

Marami sa ating mga Pilipino dito sa Pilipinas at sa buong mundo ay may mga parang hinahanap dahil ang ating Inang Bayan ay tumatalima na po sa tawag ng Diyos niyang May Likha: Tayong lahat po ay hinahamon na nitong bagong panahon na bumangon.

Marami pong problema ang Pilipinas. Hindi natin mapagkakaila ito. Kaya sa mga epektibo at makabagong solusyon po sana tayo maniwala ng buong loob at hindi sa dami ng mga problemang ito. Dahil tayong mga Pilipino lang po ang pwedeng magbigay ng lubos at makahulugang lunas sa mga ito para na rin sa bayan nating Pilipinas, wala na pong iba.

Ang katunayan po nito ay ang solusyon ay nasa atin din. Kaya nating bumangon, kapwa ko mga kapatid sa pangako, tapang lang po ang kailangan. Tapang na maniwala muli sa Pilipinas at sa isa't isa. Pananalig lang po sa tawag ng Diyos at pagsisilbi sa tawag ng Inang Bayan.

Bangon na Pilipino: Mayaman, mahirap, bata't matanda, lalaki o babae - lahat po ng nagmamahal sa Diyos at sa Pilipinas. Lahat ay magkakapatid sa Pangako dahil ito po ang lupang ipinangako.

Mapalad ang Bayan na ang Diyos ay ang PANGINOON.

Mabuhay po tayong lahat.

---<--@

The Roots of the Problem

My fellow Filipino compatriots, to begin to understand the essence of the challenges that we as a people must presently overcome, we must understand the roots of the problem.

Here are the roots of the problem. They all feed into the one tree - the wrong one - which is the tree of the desolation of war. It shall certainly bear its fruit, but not for us, my dear people.

If we are wise, my nation Philippines, we shall begin now to lovingly tend to our own undertaking of Country - that we might work to bear the good fruit of our peace for ourselves and for others as ourselves which are those fruits pleasing to God and edible to all of humanity in time and unto eternity.

Here are the roots of the problem as regards to our Philippines:

Luzon - Corruption - diminish corruption in Luzon, spiritual - individual. Bind this evil in Luzon and its tide shall diminish all over the Country, bringing honor back to politics and integrity to our seats of government.

Visayas - Geography - unite the Visayan Islands, technological - national. Bind this evil in the Visayas and it shall act as a bridge that shall further unite the nation, consolidating the spirit of our people.

Mindanao - Division - build the peace in Mindanao, human - social. Bind this evil in Mindanao and we shall obtain from God, the strength to bring down the blessings of His peace all across our one Republic whole.

To uproot these problems from their roots is to also liberate each of the three stars in our Old Defiant to shine all the more brightly for each other. It shall make our Republic progressively stronger as Old Compliant (the false image of ourselves) becomes progressively weaker.

Palawan, we shall consider as a separate challenge distinct from the main challenges specific to Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao:

Palwan - Conservation - promote the national conservation of Palawan, ecological - political. Bind the twin evil of the rampant exploitation of the natural systems of Palawan beyond their ability to sustain and regenerate themselves as well as the resulting displacement of the indigenous peoples who are its rightful stewarts and we shall as a nation obtain for our generations a natural sanctuary; a place of spirit and rest where everything is connected with everything.

The challenge of Palawan concerns all the three stars together: It is here in Palawan where we shall as a nation learn the first principles that will lead us towards Energy Independence in 2045.

If we dislike something that is not ours as a people. Let us all the more perseveringly cling to our Old Defiant, imploring the efficacious aid of our one Almighty, instead of clinging to those things that shall soon be swept away by the rise and fall of the darkness of exile time.

If we are to be left holding on to what is ours, we must first learn to let go of those things that should in no-wise belong to us.

---<--@

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.

We will be described as human beings by promise of our birth,

citizens of the one Republic of the Philippines by will of national destiny,

believers of each our own honorable religious tradition by light of each our own individual faith and human reason,

common peers from among common peers in common creation by purpose of divine design,

and kindred beings belonging to the one family of humanity by nature of our common good will for all the nations of Mankind.

A Filipino is the heart that loves the Filipino nation.