Pain is overrated.  Rage is overused.  Somehow, “painful rage” is not the accurate phrase for what I’m feeling… for what I’m visualizing.  My obsession has turned from reconciliation… to retribution.  My focus has changed to another person… to a single-celled soulless prokaryote, a parasite - a virus - who must be purged from the gene pool with a simple act of extermination.

Romance is not the motivation here, but disgust, a misanthropy towards a certain excuse for a person who represents a monstrosity, a man possessed, and must face what lies beyond life.  Death, perhaps, has its own continuity.  It begins with suffering.  It begins with a realization of humanity not in emotion, but in nerves, in pain receptors… in blood.  The essence of our humanity, but what makes us so inhuman after all.  Revenge, in a way, is a good substitute for justice.

When you hurt somebody, you know… you have to anticipate pain, not of guilt or of turmoil but of pain… excruciating pain.  A reminder that the pain caused by force and duress is not resolved or repaid through inaction, but through force and duress… amplified.  A bruise will have to be repaid with blood, and a broken heart will have to be repaid with a broken bone.  The flogging of the spirit is repaid with the flogging of the body; we commensurate a tortured soul by torturing a body.

It makes perfect sense; when you do not act like a human being, you have to be reminded of it…

From a Green perspective, there’s something wrong with all the yellow ribbons tied all over Metro Manila.  You can only imagine how many strips of plastic and yards of rope will circulate through the metropolis (who says garbage is thrown away here?) come tomorrow, when August 21 will be - yet again - forgotten.

Today happens to be the 25th death anniversary death of a rather controversial figure in Philippine history: Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino III.  Today, I suppose, begs a time to reflect.

When I was younger, my perspective on the man who graces a coveted P500 bill was an exercise in humanizing a hero.  You would respect Jose Rizal for being the national hero, and you would not question why Sergio Osmeña is on the P50 bill if you don’t know a lot about his contributions to Filipino independence.  My parents - my dad, most especially - had this critical view of Ninoy, who apparently became “heroic” not for what he did, but for what happened to him.  I think it’s a sorry feeling to be immortalized in bronze where you don’t look like you died from a gunshot, but because you slipped.

Back in college, the discussion was even more critical; for a person who was perceived by many to be a saint of democracy, Ninoy pretty much personified the antithesis.  He was the archetypal trapo. Ninoy was the scion of an affluent clan, born into privilege, with very little bonds and commonalities with the common Filipino.  Ninoy was pretty much the grand-scale version of what Ferdinand Marcos wanted to be: powerful, rich, landed, and carried a name that literally reeked of prestige and wealth.  Four years ago, at an immersion trip to Hacienda Luisita in San Miguel, Tarlac, the older tenant farmers I talked to did not hold Ninoy in a very high regard.  He was, like the clan his wife and future President Cory Aquino belonged to, the Oppressor.

Yet Ninoy was the enemy Marcos cannot defeat.  His eloquent passion was drumming up patriotic feelings, if not feelings of unbridled resentment, against the Marcos dictatorship.  Ninoy told the Philippines and the world of the excesses of the Marcos regime, from corruption to political manipulation to extrajudicial policy-making, and even the P50-million Cultural Center of the Philippines commissioned by Imelda, which he called a “Pantheon” of the regime and a “monument of shame.”  From the hallowed halls of the Senate, Ninoy’s words resonated with the anger of a people who were sick, tired, and disgusted with the rule of Marcos.

Twenty-five years ago, Ninoy announced that after three years of self-exile, he was coming back home.  Eighty-two seconds after he alighted from the plane, he got shot.  Three years later, the indignation of the Filipino people reached the critical point.  People started that long march to EDSA, and that long march to freedom.  The man who made the “willing sacrifice of the innocent” became the icon of the freedom of a people who stood against tanks and armed soldiers.  Ninoy, the inspiration and the reminder of the People Power Revolution, did not get to live to see that moment.

Yet at that very moment when he got shot, the Filipino was - and still is - worth dying for.

*     *     *

I was planning to write today about some personal stuff, some self-promoting personal epiphany, a mundane realization that I don’t have a girlfriend yet, or some odd memory brought about by quarter-life crisis.  At least for today, I arrived at one of them; something bigger than myself.

I realized that many people today tend to forget the lessons of history; that yellow ribbons might as well be breaks in the pink-and-blue color scheme of Manila’s major roads.  Or a bad reference to bad karaoke hits that feature Perry Como singles.

Come to think of it, we who grew up after Ninoy’s era tend to forget the lessons of a man who, no matter how imperfect a hero or a money décor he made, made a selfless sacrifice in the name of something bigger and far more important than himself.  We have but vague memories of Ninoy, save for those social studies lessons where we learned that this man was more than what you can buy with a P500 bill.  Or the semiotics of Ninoy’s dour, perhaps even depressed, demeanor.

Mainly because it’s one thing to reap the fruits of one man’s sacrifice; it’s another thing to help till the soil and sow the seeds of democracy.

Maybe this generation needs a Ninoy; a person to look up to.  We who will inherit the shaky (if not broken) foundations of this country’s democracy need a role model, someone who will lead us to what is right and show us what is wrong.  Yet we need not look to other people more than ourselves, from the lessons we learned from one man’s sacrifice.  We need not rely on what other people think of a hero, or on the minute details of something so extraordinary, something bigger than the inane things we exchange amongst ourselves in moments of angst and self-loathing.

There are a lot of things to loathe about today: the escalating conflict down south, the sorry state of the economy, the legitimacy of the President, the quality of education, a lost sense of nationalism… so much so that it sometimes - just sometimes - a Filipino is worth killing more than worth dying for.  Those are the same things that years before we were born, Ninoy Aquino fought against, and made the ultimate sacrifice for.

There is - and should be - a Ninoy in all of us, no matter how imperfect we are as people.  We are part of things bigger than ourselves.  Our ideals, our principles, our sovereignty, our right to a quality life, our Constitutionally guaranteed rights, our identity, our country… those are all things that are worth more than us, and as such we should be prepared make sacrifices for.

Twenty-five years after one of Philippine history’s most controversial heroes was killed, it still holds true:

The Filipino is worth dying for.

Just let me do some emo just this once.

Nothing depresses me more than a reminder of the past. On the one hand, it’s a good way to gauge how far you have moved on. On the other hand, it takes only one reminder to bring tears to your eyes, and catapult you back to a time that you thought you already have forgotten.

It’s like a comet shooting across the sky. All you leave behind eventually follow you. No matter how fast you move, no matter how far away you stray, and no matter where you go, there’s always something you leave behind that moves with you.

You know what they say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. It gets kind of difficult and tiring to convince yourself every day that everything’s over, when in fact nothing ever is.  One way or another, paths will cross, and there really isn’t anything you can do about that.  I don’t know what it is: chance, destiny, dumb luck… I don’t really know.

Comets, like people, eventually move out of orbit.  They become so close to you, and yet still so far.  The path may seem so regular, that you’ll never get to hear it or even see it.  I guess the reason why we celebrate the path of a comet so much is because we’re close to it, no matter how far it is.  But the same is not true for people; there are some people we do not want to be reminded of, or even cross paths with.  Even the remotest idea of having to one day walk on the same sidewalk as that person will send an unexplainable chill to your very spine.

I don’t know what it is.  I don’t know what feeling is there when you get to be reminded of that someone again.  I suppose that’s what happens when you didn’t close the chapter the way you wanted it to, when you never really had the chance to mend ways and part ways the way it was meant to be.

I never saw the significance of it all; but now I know that we were more than what we always thought we were, and we were more than what we thought we were meant to be.

This will be long.

I could - if I wanted to, so I will - write a stretched and overwrought “semiotic analysis” of the McDonald’s “pa-cheeseburger ka naman” meme.  In “The McDonaldization of Society,” the sociologist George Ritzer outlines four elements in the McDonald’s model that permeate modern capitalist society:

• Efficiency: the optimal method of finishing a task, translated to the fastest possible route to accomplishing it.
• Calculability: or simply put, “quantity above quality.”  Think of “Go Bigtime” meals that aren’t really big, but are “big” nonetheless.
• Predictability: it can also be put as “standardization.”  To use a cliché, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
• Control: everything becomes automatic, dehumanizing, and standardized.  If you work in outsourcing, you know this all too well.

On the one hand, you can stretch the semiotic to its extreme by saying that cheeseburgers placate Filipino society: no omnivorous Filipino will ever say no to a free cheeseburger.  “Cheeseburger” is the social version of Noni Juice (I don’t know where that thing went, either).  I don’t care if you’re on a diet, or if you’re for worker’s rights at McDo, you won’t pass up a chance at a free cheeseburger.  The process of making, eating, distributing, and meme-ficating a McDonald’s cheeseburger is efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled.

Do I hate being asked for a cheeseburger for some absurd reason?  Yes.  Do I hate the cheeseburger itself?  No.  As a matter of fact, the lowly cheeseburger is one of my favorite food-like objects at McDo.  The real ingredients of the patty, much less the cheese, are best left to theory and speculation.  The consequence is much more strange, profound, and even irritating.  Upset stomachs, anyone?

Like I wrote earlier, cheeseburgers - metaphorical or real - placate Filipino society.  There are many examples of “cheeseburgers” in Filipino society.  Take the MRT: never mind treating your fellow person with respect by not invading his or her personal space by forming a queue, you would just cram yourself in with the same efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled pace of cramming yourself into the train.  Or there’s my favorite “cheeseburger” of them all: not caring at all.

*     *     *

The SONA has come and gone, and there have been a lot of ranting all over the World Wide Internet on the matter of this strange, profound, irritating… efficient… calculable… predictable… controlled… line:

Before you start complaining and criticizing the government, you should first criticize yourself.  You always jump to conclusions.  Why not support the President?  You do nothing but criticize and criticize but you do nothing for this country.

That’s a précis, a paraphrase, and a summary of a lot of comments I’ve been reading for the past 30 minutes.

I admit that yes, there’s a lot of inconvenience in people like myself who challenged a (for all intents and purposes) McDonaldized society and Government.  To be honest, I don’t have to write about politics and what I think is wrong with This Government.  I don’t have to do anything, either.  All I’m doing, much less forcing myself to do (which is a tragedy in itself), is when I live up to the basic demands of being a citizen:

• The moment I buy something, I automatically am a taxpayer.
• The moment I first raised my hand to recite Panatang Makabayan, I automatically pledged my allegiance to this country “sa isip, sa salita, at sa gawa.”
• The moment I write “Filipino” on any - and I mean any - given form that requires me to write down my citizenship, I automatically affirm my being a Filipino.

If there’s any self-criticism to be done, it is by those who don’t act and do their share as citizens with rights guaranteed by the Constitution.  I bet a cheeseburger you can’t even criticize yourself since you’re so apathetic, so I guess I’ll do it for you.

There’s a little about “self-criticism” that I learned back in the day, and that’s you criticize yourself because you acknowledge that you, an individual, are part of a whole.  You criticize yourself because you’re part of something bigger than yourself.  There are a lot of things that happen to be your business as a taxpayer, as a citizen with guaranteed rights, as a Filipino, and not the least of which is the faults of The Government you put into power anyway.  Sure, the day-to-day affairs of The Government are “none of my business,” but the day-to-day things that bring about things like Garci tapes and NBN-ZTE happen to affect me, my taxes, and my flag.  So yes, they happen to be my business, your business, and certainly everybody’s business.

I’m not going to apologize for what follows next.

When you try to step on a cockroach, it will retaliate.  A protist, when disturbed from its peaceful state, will deliberately destroy its host.  A virus, when programmed with enough bullshit, will infect a living cell and wreak havoc.  It is only an apathetic, uncaring human being with absolutely no sense of civic duty that will do nothing.

It’s a tragedy when things like “citizenship” and “civic duty” become so alien and strange to us, but we do understand a cheeseburger meme.  If there’s anything worth giving cheeseburgers for nowadays, it’s not for the hatak crowd in whatever rally there is; it’s for people who actually do something, like stand up for their rights when they’re stepped on, and demand a bit of accountability and transparency from The Government.  Yes, you - Apathetic Filipino-By-Technicality - are lower in the evolutionary scale than a common roach and a flagellated protist, and viruses are better than you.

Kaya… pa-burger ka naman!

I saw him yesterday, clutching his stomach near the parking lot at The Podium.  Moments ago, I saw him seated at a flight of stairs near Robinsons’ Galleria.  Tomorrow, I think I’ll still see him in that faded white Crispa shirt, blue shorts, worn slippers… and still clutching his stomach.

I see scenes like this all the time, but never in the seeming opulence of a place that’s supposed to be the headquarters of multinational corporations and agencies.  Here you have San Miguel Corporation, the Asian Development Bank, JG Summit, call centers.  At every corner, there’s a MiniStop, a 7-Eleven, or a Starbucks.  Nowhere else in the Philippines - not even in Makati - would you see the kind of wealth that speaks of class and sophistication.  Yet nowhere else would you be so maniacally depressed to see scenes like that hungry man sitting there, pale and sunburned, wondering if there is any salvation to be met in starvation and sheer exhaustion.

I kind of wonder if class structures are meant to be oppressive.  The truth is, they’re not.  Much about the harmony of society is defined and made possible by the fact that we are unequal.  Your economic standing is the Noble Lie of capitalist society; you’re meant to be in at least one of the many different striations of “rich,” “poor,” and that arbitrary substrate called “the middle class.”

It is when these structures start to become oppressive, when their blatant obviousness slaps you in the face, that you see what injustice is made of.  It is when you start to contrast what was once taken-for-granted - and see the stark difference between the haves and the have-nots, that injustice is supposed to move you.

Too bad, it doesn’t have to.  It doesn’t have to be moving, considering that this hungry man is not alone.  Millions of Filipinos are just like this man, only they’re not surrounded by skyscrapers and opulence and coffee-swilling underpaid employees of corporations.  It doesn’t have to be obvious when his image is drowned by business suits and crisp polo shirts.  It doesn’t have to be unjust, when there are so many other injustices in the world to piss you off besides his grumbling stomach and his pale, lined face.

But then again, what can I do?