poverty – PATHLESS TRAVELS

2017-10-132019-10-13

Drugs and EJKs and cop stories

TRANSFERRING ANTI-DRUG OPERATIONS TO THE Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency won’t basically solve the problem — neither the drug problem nor extra-judicial killings or EJK. Why? Because:

2013-05-252021-01-26

In the vicinity of the Gates of Hell

Makeshift tent of streetfolk along Timog Ave near GMA Center — First they were just daytime resting places, temporary parking spots for makeshift trash carts that competed in vain with SUVs and big cars for sidewalk space. Increasingly, the carts became sleeping cots with covers, like doghouses on wheels. In the rainy season the exposed ones turned into makeshift tents, like doghouses wearing raincoats. Many homeless folk have started to make the sidewalks along Timog Ave and EDSA their home, especially near the GMA Center. Not that there’s a significance of so many homeless folk living near one of the biggest media centers and a historic road this side of Metro Manila. But there’s irony simmering just below the surface.

“Manila deserves the tag ‘Gates of Hell’, when a man kills himself on the MRT tracks, and inconvenienced riders simply groan and say, ‘Namerhuwisyo pa.'”

That recent remark, posted recently on my Facebook page, was my little contribution to the fast-growing social media commentary among Filipinos that seethed around Dan Brown’s latest book, Inferno. Some Filipino observers had whipped up a titanic controversy out of a 3-page passage that described poverty-stricken Manila as the seeming gate of Hell in the eyes of the novel’s major protagonist.

For now I won’t dwell on the broad range of Philippine social-media reactions triggered by this issue. Here I merely want to share my own thin slices of insight into what our metropolis has turned into. Continue reading “In the vicinity of the Gates of Hell”

2012-12-162022-12-25

A madman’s Christmas prayer

A living ghost haunts the private road between the slaughterhouse and the Resurrection.

This is not a poem. It’s something I wrote several Decembers ago, posted originally on another blog site, and reposted here with a few minor revisions. I call it meditative prose. And since it’s addressed to someone who may or may not be there, I also call it a prayer. If you feel offended or blasphemed by references to Jesus, then stop reading right here.

###

Continue reading “A madman’s Christmas prayer”