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.
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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.

The Haze

Hazing is all about the "haze".

There has been a lot of public controversy about hazing. Most of it is well founded.

This matter mostly concerns our youth.

Because most of those who speak out against hazing are grieving parents who have lost a son or a daughter to it - respected fathers and beloved mothers in the Nation.

For many are the names heard who perished from the ineptitude and utter recklessness of those who haze who understanding nothing about the "haze". And it is always one life too many, and it is always one of our hopeful and aspiring, spirited, young starshines.

Those who themselves did not conquer the haze now use their blindness to mindlessly destroy young lives and young dreams. They do not haze, they simply abuse. Some of them so wantonly and so recklessly that perhaps they have come to feel they have a special license to secretly propagate their violence in the minds and hearts of our children in the Nation.

They have no such right.

Those traditions who transmit violence for violence's own sake are evil and empty and also blind. It mires the spirit of our youth permanently in a state of inward confusion and afflicts them in their formative ages until they themselves resolve to regard violence as a point of clarity and resolution. Until they themselves become inwardly drawn to violence as a mode and an answer to interior conflicts.

It is a betrayal.



Those who did not physically perish - have themselves perished - from the thought - that lived within the formative longing in them - for those self-same spirit ideals of civic trust and human solidarity integral to the formation of a crucial sense of a uniquely personal sense of identity - distinctive - yet identifiable with and within a greater, common belonging - a civic identity, a citizenship.

- selah -

The issue at hand as regards the controversy on hazing, I am convinced, is not really about hazing but about those who have corrupted its spirit and living tradition. It is really about criminal abuse, spiritual corruption, and the betrayal of the common trust of our generations.

Hazing is an act of passing on. One does not endure it or merely survive it, one must conquer it and from it prevail in passing from a past life into another one.

It afflicts in an inductee, a deliberate sense of confusion and this state is - the haze.

How this is done may be physical or mental or both. And though it shall and - it must - always involve a level of pain, it must never be done to excess. Because it is intended to be a spiritual rigor. Those who pass it on must be careful in passing it on - because the act itself always contains something...

One emerges from the haze, into the fullness of the clarity of its intended evolution. It is always part of a program of initiation and indoctrination. And it is always an act of spiritual connection, sacred as well as intimate. It proves trust and blesses it. A paradox to those who do not experience it from within.

The haze is what it produces. Because a lie is a lie is a lie - but - it is not self-deception unless one believes that a lie is not a lie - inasmuch as to knowingly tell a lie and to knowingly impugn the Truth is not the same action.

It has something to do with character building - and - it has everything to do with leadership formation in a peerage Institution.

Because self-deception is the enemy of every Code that institutionalize leadership professionally in the formal and in the national, civil as well as military. And it shows no prejudice to rank just as much as the Code shows no yield to the equality of its application.

Because ultimately, it is only a question of one or the other.

The Code answers to a question, and it is a question of honor, and it is a question too - that no man nor woman may know the answer to - unless he or she becomes - and is made answerable to - the question itself.

And is not a question of violence - or how violent.

The haze is what it produces: It makes for a vigilant spirit and an upright heart. It produces focus and clarity of intention. And it is always an integral part of a greater spirit of a living tradition of leadership formation and academic excellence. It prepares leaders to serve among leaders.

But if it only passes on an empty spirit and a dead tradition - in this controversy on hazing, we may also see - the blind can never lead the blind.
---<--@

Life itself will haze us, you know. Individuals and Nations too. And in the world outside, if one loses sight of one's own true self - or what is true - it will be permanent, and it will be for real.

Fear only what is certain.

Then KCCO.

Exchange Fish

Happy, happy, fish, fish - sushi!

Me and my Miyang
gave each other
a fish today.

It was
the same kind of fish
of exactly the same size...
and it tasted the same, too.

Indeed,
the only thing
that made it different 
was the giving...

For it came from our hearts...
and made something ordinary
into something extraordinary.

It was all it took
to make us happy cats.
---<--@

We are, therefore, we must

The first were the angels, formed in light.
Beings of pure spirit, timeless, forever bright.

The last was mankind, known as the children.
Conceived in darkness and conceived in light.



My citizenship and your citizenship are neither more nor less than each other -
at the rising of each moment, a quality that is forever equal in our soul.

We know it as truth in our spirit and in our hearts,
we express it in the reality of the nationhood that we embrace as a people.

Together, we give each other identity, order, purpose, and strength -
that we may make of this gift of belonging together what we ought to make it.

Upon this equal pursuit we as citizens must rely on the nurture of human freedoms
and the quality of our individual happiness, in this world or the next one, depend on it...
on our learning of it - and from it - and of the freedom of God with it.

In this way, by the light of our liberty -
in that enlightening sense of truth, we as one nation, collectively posses -
the Light in the heart of darkness triumph in each of our living
and by each life lived to the fullest - we are so gathered under heaven -
a nation among one great family of nations - by our faith in God and faith in our people -
across our generations - worlds upon worlds - quenched in everlasting waters...
in the fullness of a forever we can only begin to imagine...
or even dare to inspire.

We are, therefore, we must.
---<--@

Innermost Freedom

There are four basic powers professed in freedom - choice, thought, want and fear.



Of the four, the first three are enabling forms, and the fourth an empowering form - all four are governed by brightness or lack of the light - in the person of Man, the first three are rooted in the spiritual and the last one, distinctly in the physical.

These powers bend and incline the will, shape and give force to understanding and govern the ambition of the mind as regard to knowledge and the obtaining of the truth.

These are the freedoms located in the interior most space of the heart - where only the LORD may go - they are sacred, inviolable, and distinct per individual - Angels and Humans both possess them (and, wherever the grace of God permits, in varying degrees, may also become possessed by them).


Freedom is to know Freedom