“A good newspaper is never nearly good enough. But a lousy newspaper is a joy forever,” an old wisecrack goes. It resonated in the Philippine Press Institute (PPI) conference: “Watching the Watchdog: Re-examining Ourselves.”
Some Catholic bishops “flunked” President Aquino for “failing to curb poverty” even as the Philippines’ economic growth outstripped that of other Asian countries. “Growth has not trickled down to the poor,” scoffed National Secretariat for Social Action’s Bishop Broderick Pabillo. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d give Aquino a grade of three.”
Wasting food is “like stealing from tables of the poor,” Pope Francis told a UN World Environment Day audience. “A culture of waste… is despicable when many suffer from hunger.”
Sao Paulo State University research showing that tree seeds are now significantly smaller (“Shriveled seeds,” 6/3/13) triggered comments. Was this due to unchecked hunting of fruit-eating birds? The issue is increasingly “common in tropical areas around the world.”
Did the hunting of fruit-eating birds lead to the shriveling of tree seeds, asks the journal Science in its latest issue. This can damage, beyond previous estimates, already-stressed tropical rainforests.
The secret is “busting out all over,” as a 1956 Broadway tune puts it. The Vatican isn’t talking. Neither is the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
“The future starts today, not tomorrow,” Pope John Paul II once cautioned. That reality underpins the new Asian Development Bank study that sketches “a daunting unfinished agenda when the Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015.”
Naty has not heard or read about the Marcoses, Estradas, Binays and Ampatuans wresting election victory. She is a 53-year-old beggar who looks a haggard 80. What matters is even leftover food, she shrugs.
“Do not look at the heavens through a bamboo reed.” Can this Japanese proverb help us sift through the May 13 elections’ mixed bag? Nobody loses an election here. Those trashed insist they were cheated.
The catholic bishops of Bacolod and Lipa were shell-shocked by the election results. Earlier, they listed the candidates who supported the reproductive health bill under “Team Patay.” Through ads and sample ballots, they urged repudiation.
“Ah, the chill of consciousness returns,” the poetic drunk Uncle Seamus would groan after a bender the night before. Morning after the May 13 elections, what do we wake up to?
“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war—or before an election.” Otto von Bismarck’s adage unreels with a vengeance in the homestretch of the May 13 elections.
