Is there hope for the hopeless?

 “Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope?! – I mean, it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid! – but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope?"
- Terence Mckenna 

Sometimes I wonder if it's better to regress back into ignorance and just live life in conformity to this culture of passivity that we're seeing all around us. Sometimes I wish that I don't know the things I know, and maybe my life would be different today. And sometimes, when I ride a jeepney on my way to work I see all this working people just trying to get by and think to myself how oblivious they are to where our world is going and most of them seems contented and well adjusted to this dysfunctional society. Believe me, I've tried to plug myself back into this culture just as Cypher wanted to do in the movie "The Matrix" and started contemplating the path of blissful ignorance. But the more I try to ignore the reality of our world the more I realized that once you're exposed to the kind of information that I was exposed to, there's really no turning back. Curiosity is in our nature after all and fortunately (or unforunately) for me, my formal indoctrination in our educational system have failed to completely crush the innate inquisitiveness in me. 

"As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See I made a graph. I make lots of graphs."  - Lisa Simpson

I don't claim to be smarter than the average Juan dela Cruz, but I do feel that I tend to be more engaged in social issues than most people. And it's hard to find any who are. Sometimes the only way I can get interesting conversations is with my barber, while listening to his AM radio, or with a random taxi driver, these people who are supposedly under educated tend to care more about society than most of my college graduate peers.

Our generation is privileged enough to be in an age where information access is easy and was raised in a comfortable setting, enough to allow ourselves to flourish as a human being. Very few of us have the chance to acquire these privileges we have today and yet for most of us who do, waste away their chances on celebrity gossips and vain materialism. 

"Whose interest does ignorance serve?" said Carl Sagan and this quote is enough to motivate me to be better informed about the world around me. In the age of information access, Ignorance is a choice. I'm still in the process of reeducation. I'm teaching myself skills and knowledge that goes beyond what's needed on my day job. Hopefully I'll be able to sort them all out without compromising my main gig. 

“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.” - Noam Chomsky

Sidewalk Notary Office

Having been born in Cebu, and living here for most of my lifetime. I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't been to a lot of places here. And when I say places, I'm not even talking about the beaches, the tourist spots, the malls, the restaurants. No. not those kind of places, I'm talking about the heart of urban Cebu which is downtown. If you really want to experience the reality of living in one of Philippines' fastest developing cities, you really need to check out Downtown / Colon.

A few days ago, my friend and I decided to go to City Hall to look for a "lawyer" in the hope of securing a notarized affidavit of loss. It was a Saturday, so it wasn't as crowded and you can hardly find the annoying people who will ambush you and ask you for "notaryo bai?". In fact we had to go to the side of the City hall to find them there beneath an arcaded sidewalk. This is where I met Manang, a lady I think in her 60's or 70's. She was the encoder. The way their business works goes something like this; There are people who I call "pimps", these are the ones who look for clients in the street. And as soon as the "pimps" know what the client wants, they ask you to write the necessary information on a tiny piece of paper and pass it to Manang for the encoding. Manang did all the encoding in her almost antique typewriter. Just by the way she uses the knobs on her typewriter to adjust the alignment, you can already tell that she's been using it for a very long long time.

As for the Affidavit of loss, she already had a "fill in the blanks" form where all she needed to do was type the needed information and Presto, you have yourself an affidavit. At that time, Manang have used up all her affidavit forms, so she needed to to reproduce another set of copies. The problem was, she barely had any money to pay for the photocopy. She looked for her wallet on her small drawer and was fortunate to find a few folded worn out "bente" pesos and asked one of their errand boys to photocopy the forms. Our affidavit cost us 150 pesos.

It's been said that the measure of a society is how well they treat its weakest members. And these images speak for themselves how this city, with all its glory and economic growth has yet to trickle down to the most common of people.

The Futility of the Livable Cebu Movement

Photo not taken by me

It was the usual Monday morning rush. I was riding a jeepney on my way to work (late again). One of the stickers posted at the back of the driver caught my eye. It was a simple graphic with the words " Movement for a livable Cebu", an organization that is frequently featured in the newspapers nowadays. I let out a small chuckle. The usual traffic from Talamban to Ayala was severely frustrating and I figured that I have all the time in the world to think of the legitimacy of the organization as well as its sincerity. As citizens, I think it's only appropriate of us to always be skeptical especially when organizations like this start to arise, coincidentally when election season is fast approaching. But even if we do assume that these people are sincere and well intentioned, unfortunately, sincerity doesn't always translate to effectiveness and sometimes in this case, might even prolong the problem itself. 

It is not my intention to downplay their contributions to Cebu. I think they're very important especially in keeping the level of corruption at bay and have enough influence to make significant changes when dealing with environmental issues. But I wonder if they are aware that their movement only address the symptoms of a problem. Do they know that the deterioration of Cebu's environment is very much tied to the class struggle. Can we really expect to revitalize the physical environment of Cebu without first revitalizing the economic conditions of the rest of the population? From my perspective, Cebu is fast becoming like another Manila. A highly stratified society where there's a few people at the top controlling the wealth while the majority of the population are working in the "service sector", in other words servicing the affluent few. Maybe in the future, similar to what happened in Manila when an international delegate went there to ironically discuss about poverty, we'll also build walls around slums just to hide our marginalized people.

 While the rest of the world are now focusing on the  Third industrial revolution  to overhaul their outdated infrastructures, Cebu on the other hand, is still developing under the templates of outdated ideas. They're still trapped on the superficial level of progress. They associate large buildings and the saturation of super Malls in the cityscape as an indicator of progress. Therefore, we're not only lagging behind other countries technologically, but also our mentality/consciousness has to catch up as well. So the reason I question the intentions of the Movement for livable Cebu, is because I feel that they're barely scratching the surface of what's truly behind all these problems. In the words of the late George Carlin;

"I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists; these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me."

Welcome to Blissful Cebu.

a trisikad drives past a wall covered with a tarpaulin poster of the ongoing 45th Annual Board of Governors meeting of the Asian Development Bank at suburban Pasay city south of Manila, Philippines, Thursday May 3, 2012.