A few weeks ago, I wrote about the harassment of SM Development Corp. (SMDC) and its contractor by the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) led by its president, Arnel Casanova. Here are the facts. A video grab showed Casanova, accompanied by security personnel armed with high-caliber weapons (the Commission on Elections’ gun ban [...]
We seldom buy newspapers but on May 23 my son, Ron, came with the day’s Inquirer issue in hand. I started reading the paper and suddenly I was reading Ceres Doyo’s column (“Becoming the world’s most bullied”). I liked the column and I praise Doyo for her opinion. I agree that we are the world’s most bullied nation.
This is a reaction to the Youngblood article “Schadenfreude” (Opinion, Inquirer, 4/11/13) and the editorial “Battling bullies” (Opinion, Inquirer, 1/26/13). To an extent, I did experience bullying during my otherwise enjoyable student days years ago. But thankfully, my experiences came few and far between and were not as awful as those endured by some of my classmates.
In Grade 5, one of my classmates was frequently subjected to ridicule, indignities, meanness, verbal abuse, etc. I forgot how he came to be the class bullies’ unfortunate target. But I remember how his life became miserable. Looking back, I am glad that he left for another school after Grade 6. His situation would have most likely worsened had he remained there in high school.
Filipinós are saddened by the death of Lolong, the world’s biggest crocodile in captivity. Not to worry, there are still many, bigger and greedier crocodiles in Congress. They should also be in captivity.
What makes bullying so terrible is that it takes something full of brightness—childhood—and buries it in darkness. Bullying is a sordid reality in our schools that has caused many children deep suffering and distress. There are too many instances of children being so harassed that they become physically ill—or worse.
With so many stories about bullying surfacing lately, now we hear even the gorgeous model Tyra Banks admit that she was also bullied when she was a skinny 11-year-old. On the local level, we recently heard of the adult who pointed a gun at the head of a high school student inside a campus in an exclusive subdivision in Makati.
It never entered my mind that China, the new superpower of the world, would even think of bullying our small nation. For so long, experts on China would tell me on the long history of China not attacking its neighbors although often had itself attacked, invaded, conquered. I saw only the Tibet takeover of China, but China claimed that it had not attacked a neighbor – only reclaimed what was China’s in the first place.
This is a call to fellow Filipinos to be more than concerned with and to get involved in the current standoff between the Philippines and China over Scarborough Shoal. Let’s be fully aware of the dire implications of this ongoing dispute. Let’s join demonstrations and mass actions condemning what China is doing to our country. [...]
I’m glad the P-Noy (President Benigno Aquino III) administration is at least making a show of refusing to be bullied by China. Though it would probably advance its cause farther by diplomatic rather than physical means, such as by rallying the Asean countries to support its position, which is a perfectly reasonable one. I say [...]
In the Philippines’ war of words with China over the Spratlys, the United States has made it clear it’s siding with neither, which means it is siding with China and leaving its former colony in the lurch. This is the logic of the surprising e-mail statement of US press attaché Rebecca Thompson regarding the remark [...]
