Peace be with you, sister

I too am for peace. It is my hope that peace shall one day be the rule in this Republic of ours rather than the exception. I believe that if we are patient, and we are a patient people, peace for all of us shall be inevitable. For now, let us not lose hope.

On the National Conversation

Trying times bring out the best and the worst in people and these are trying times indeed...

One should always presuppose something human about the State and the Philippine State being what it is, democratic, a healthy clash of opinions is a good sign.

I agree with those who disagree with me in that they like myself are free to express their thoughts on matters concerning the life of our State.

One should not be the judge of opinions other than one's own.

If your stand is stood on principles, then your opinions as a reflection of your convictions should outlast the opinions of the hasty and the reckless. 

However, when we start turning on each other as judges of each other's belief, things start to turn from sour to bitter. Because this makes it political. 

Let the facts shape our belief. Let the truth dictate our vision.

I believe our civics or basically the art of how we treat each other as citizens is grounded on the truths of our nationhood. Therefore, "our" national conversation should be generally conducted in the spirit of our civics.

We as a people talk all the time. 

We are free to do so by a freedom that is our right and responsibility - "free expression", it is called. Free expression as a form of participation in the life of our nation (and ultimately in the politics of our State) is what I refer to as our national conversation.

The Filipino media, our free press, are our gatekeepers as regards the national conversation which is why to impinge upon press freedoms is the beginning of the end of free expression in the nation.

Our government and its institutions are formally represented to the Filipino public by each its own public affairs representatives. Our press is the popular equivalent. This is important.

One who believes in free expression should also make the connection in his mind that press freedom is just as important and in his heart understand the reciprocity of its good.

It has been said that a state that begins burning its books ends up burning its own people.

In much the same fashion, any democratic government or for that matter, any free people not outraged at attacks on its own free press do not understand how free expression works and place themselves in peril of ultimately losing it. Indeed, we ought by knowledge of this be forewarned about the twin values of press freedom and free expression and live our freedoms accordingly.

Brother and sister Filipinos, we should care about the quality of the conversation we are having as a nation. 

To this end, I should laud our media people who are working hard to make all this talk a worthwhile thing to have for all of us.

I too believe the talk we should be having, for our national conversation to bear us good fruit, should be focused on quality. Our conversations about issues that matter should always honorably reflect, in spite of the sobering reality of so many woes, our highest ideals and beliefs.

Our national conversation serves the quest for truth, and truth in service of the people.

I think we should mostly be concerned with solutions to our problems and not on identifying problems we already have but fear to own... maybe because what once was a molehill has now turned into a granite mountain seemingly right before our minds.

When I say this conversation becomes political, I mean it in the sense of the politics that is exercised by our politicians in the formal government of our State.

We are not all politicians after all nor should we all desire to be. We are all citizens though and as not all of us are elected (by us) and set apart by popular mandate into those formal positions of public service within our Republic, our politics are basically expressed through the national conversation in support of the politics of our representative leadership in the formal government of our State.

If one would and takes this all a step further, one writes or contacts directly, his or her representations in the formal government of the State in the Executive, Legislative or Judiciary branches.

Politics are important and because it is, public participation in the political life of our Republic is vital.

All things political to our nation arises within the State from the soul and into soil of our nationhood... its science shaped and empowered by the art of our civics.

Not all of us are politicians, brothers and sisters, but all our politicians are citizens and to the extent that they are, all our politicians should be statesmen and stateswomen.

And those of us who should freely submit ourselves to their leadership ought duly and willingly participate in the national conversation.

In a democracy, we are all leaders.

As all good leaders know, all leaders learn the art of their leadership as followers. In a democracy, all of us too are basically led by the light of our own truth. Hence, leadership in the sense that it is democratic should know and understand that to lead and to follow are one and the same responsibility.

If we know and understand this, and if we trust in the decisiveness and clarity of our vision, all our talking will lead to the one walk - along the way of ascent that will lead us to the eventual and true awakening of all our national dreaming...

All our words should lead us (again and again) to the realization of the promised truths of our peace.

Because truth is truth and at the summit of our Republic Sky lay for all our hearts, the ideals drawn from our highest truths - of proven principles that enable us to conceive together a vision of the State that is always comprehensible to the Filipino soul no matter how different our opinions on the ground may be...

Actual proof of this is our written Constitution, this national document being a distillation of the Filipino spirit handed down to us in physical form. (Have we ever wondered why from one proceed the many and how from the many, one? Have we truly taken to heart its Preamble?)

I trust that leaders be responsible for their own truths and for speaking it out with respect of their own dignity and the dignity of other citizens not unlike them - being honorable Filipinos. 

And so we begin... again and again... while time is time. Till every question and answer become unto us all simultaneously one and the same thing...

Let us have a conversation as a nation... and let our free expression propel our democracy forward to the good of our Republic as a service to our nation and therefore, to the benefit of each and of all.

God bless the Philippines. Mabuhay po tayong lahat.
---<--@

Love of Family, Love of Community

Self-interest is an exact definition of national interest. 

The national interest as self-interest is intrinsically selfish but the center of its will lies illumined in the life of the national community. A community must be self-interested else it shall not last long. 



All human beings are naturally self-interested creatures the same with all creatures in God's creation. 

We must be or else, we have a problem. There is no backing out of being. No physical coming back to the womb. Else, life and living itself can not progress and evolve. 

Self-interest here is not an evil, lack of it is.  

Now, there are forms of self-interest greater than the person of the self. 

An example of this is the institution of the family. Man and Woman as a unified whole is invested in a form of self-interest that is distinct from Man and Woman as their individual persons.

Religion regards this union as sacred and it is. 

Religion blesses those who bless life even at its conception and regards with holy esteem those who receive with the welcome of peace the life of those who are born to this world.

Nations regard this union as necessary. 

Ours is the trust that protects and prospers the life of the family and the communities that bless, provide for, and accept tribe and family with a greater welcome of peace. 

- selah -

Family is our basic introduction to life in the national community. 

It forms the ground of our civics. 

As individual citizens we must know without our fathers and mothers who as Family gave to us the choice we could not make at birth, we would simply not be. 

No babe is born with a freedom that is complete. In fact, we were the least free among God's creatures at the very moment of our birth. As babes, not one of us could even make the choice to live.

It is family who gave us the choice to live. 

And these choices often come at the expense of other choices that our fathers and mothers willingly subordinated to that form of self-interest greater and maturer than what their persons usually demanded of them as individuals alone. 

Regardless of how everything proceeded from that moment therefore, to honor thy father and mother is pre-requisite to the knowledge of life in the national community. 

The common instruction to the value of the choices we make in community - we learn simply from the action of family and as not all families are the same, we honor father and mother still for that one choice they had to make for us as babes. 

For none of us could ever truly make that choice. Nor boast about it without sin.

So in civics it is the same; that those of us who are without choices is served in society by those of us who are able to make those choices - to live - so that none of us should ever be so poor so as to live without liberty or be so fated by the random nature of this world to endure without hope or live without peace. 

- selah -

I think the saying that those who have least in life should have more in law is one better illumined by the first principle of sufficiency through reliance. And this principle better understood simply by honoring our fathers and our mothers in the light of the right remembrance.

Through life in the family, love and memory is from generation to generation brought forth into the nation so that in our civics, we may make good choices in each other's behalf - that all of us in the land may live long and the nation prosper in peace.
 ---<--@

The Craft of Citizens

Civics is the craft of citizens. Politics is the craft of the State.

Our first consideration: 

We are a nation. This makes us a human people.

We are human beings with common human needs. The cause of our nationhood are human causes. We are through our nationhood sought by heaven on earth that we may be sheltered in peace and sheltered that we may be sent forth in goodwill unto our Mankind.

Because we are, our identity and belonging is established upon a timeless foundation. There are truths about our being as a free and sovereign human community that are changeless and unyielding - as changeless and as unyielding as the peace that in our nation gathers us together and sends us forth as one.

Peace, written in our hearts, is the soul of our nationhood and has been before we were a people.

We are a nation forever. For the peace that forever belong to our nation is an eternal salutation.

The cause of our nationhood are our human causes.

The craft of all nations is peace.

When we know peace, we know memory. 

When we know memory, we know when and where in ourselves does hope spring and goodwill proceeds - in the peace of our nationhood and from the nationhood in ourselves (respectively).

God is our Highest Reliance. The First Defended of our Republic.

Before we know our civics, we must understand our nationhood.

That what makes us human, one to another, makes us also belong to all heaven and earth.

Our second consideration: 

What makes us citizens makes us belong to the temporal State and prepares us for greater belongings.

There is no science that serves to initiate the student of civics to a prior body of knowledge about the art of his or her citizenship. Civic aptitude does not come by way of great academic knowledge.

Recall to thy heart the fall of the first morning star of the first firmament and imagine a single star in the night sky, shining by itself from eternity.

Without the company of other stars, shall this bright morning star have cause to think itself dim or bright?

A great intellect may think itself bright only because he or she is always in the company of a myriad other lesser ones. Whether one is loathe to admit this fact or not, it is a civic truth. 

Sufficiency through reliance.

We are only as far as each of us allow, eaches only as far as we are.

Peace in the nation allows for each of us to allow that - we are.

Civics allow us to be and to function as eaches - as far as we are...

Citizens who together as a Body Politic form through the democratic foundation of the Philippine State, the one Philippine Republic whole.

Our third and final consideration:

A student of civics is a heart willing to listen... Citizenship is a lifelong art.

You do not learn it by reading alone. You acquire it by hearing it, and following, and leading.

You do not teach it by much speaking. You transmit it by living it, and loving, and remembering.

Apply yourself to knowing your civics and your civics will apply itself to teaching itself to you.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

And let us together in the nation grow bright, certainly brighter than the long night.

Start by simply not littering, if you like. And know why you do it.

Begin by respecting the ground of our earth.
---<--@

Personal Reflection

Civics inform our Politics and Politics shape the State wherein we all are citizens first.

One may be civic oriented without ever being political. One may not be political however, without any civic orientation. Politics that is professed without any grounding in civics is almost always mercenary in form, without any concept of loyalty to Country or duty to the common good.

Is it political to love a person, a thing, a place, a time, or a truth?

It may be that the State ought to be concerned about what we love. That the State may know to withdraw from interior freedoms where these are concerned.

There is no such thing as a wrong love.

Politics shall never find enough of itself in itself to prove or disprove what love there is or what love there is not - in any person. It shall soon exhaust its own expression against a question it is never intended to address.

Where interior freedoms are concerned, the State should have a recourse to exhort the civic spirit of the nation and empower the love of the people to bear the right fruit that more and more of our people may know to trust in better things and therefore, be served eventually by better loves.
---<--@

Apart from the Love of God, the Devil has no existence.

Or be a ninja, if you like.

Cheers. Steady on.