How did the midterm elections affect the urban poor? More than any other group, the poor need free elections to improve their lives, but the simple truth seems to be that in the last poll exercise they hardly benefited. It was partly their own doing.
Raul S. Gonzalez, whose recent death the Inquirer reported (5/18/13), was truly an outstanding man of letters. He was a writer, editor, educator, public relations man, and mentor to many now-accomplished writers.
Economic growth is front-page news everywhere. But experience tells us that the link between income and human development is far from assured. Worldwide, countries with similar per capita incomes have had quite different achievements in basic education or basic health. In the 1990s, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had similar per capita incomes, yet the poverty rate in the Philippines was much higher then and has remained so.
“WHY WOULD someone with the name Asuncion [a great feast of Mary] find time to pass judgement on the Catholic Church?” (reaction to “Spiritual but not religious,” Inquirer, 4/27/13). Once in a while I do get such rebukes, friendly and not so. A prelate once commended me for a column but remarked that “the institution can’t be destroyed; many have tried but failed.” But he got me right; it’s the institution that I twit, not the wonderful works of the people of God. Probably for my ears, a priest said that the Church “is like an elephant”—that is, big and indestructible.
On the last day of my visit to the United States last month, I dropped by Barnes & Noble in San Francisco to check out what I could read on the long flight home the next morning. What quickly caught my attention among the new releases was “Proof of Heaven” (2012), No. 1 on the New York Times’ list of bestsellers. The intriguing title plus the professional credentials of the author got me sold on the book in no time.
The adult posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD is now a well-accepted condition, which was first observed among Vietnam War veterans. Now I think there is another form of PTSD—the fetal posttraumatic stress disorder.
The article of Asuncion David Maramba, “Spiritual but not religious” (Opinion, 4/26/13), set me to thinking about what I am.
When the SMP (service management program) Teachers Camp opened last May 2, Prof. Joel Bawica of Laguna State Polytechnic University (LSPU) remarked that he felt a combination of nervousness and pride: nervousness because he and his peers would be wrestling with new and unfamiliar content, and pride because his institution would be one of the first state universities and colleges to participate in a project that aims to align higher education goals with the competencies demanded by the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) industry.
Last May 4, the Economist, a conservative weekly magazine in London, commented on the “Chinese dream” as articulated by China’s new president, Xi Jinping, and related it to the “American dream.”
The Commission on Elections’ odd decision to leave the candidates and the whole nation hanging in suspense with its sudden adjournment as a canvassing body on the night of Election Day “to take a much-needed rest” was a public relations blunder. It again opened the electoral process, particularly the counting, to doubt and speculation.
You know you are getting old when you drive into a religious novitiate and care more about the men and women in the cemetery than the present novices. I realized this as we drove into the Jesuits’ Sacred Heart Novitiate in Novaliches one day.
April 5 marked the beginning of the 1,000-day countdown signaling the end of the implementation period of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But while the Philippines is still struggling with reaching MDG targets, the global community, for almost a year, has already been deliberating on the new development agenda beyond 2015. What is of concern is that there is little discussion about these global processes—which will impact our own national development in the next decades—in our own backyard.
