Havens of evil

CLOSE DOWN all motels. They are havens of evil.
The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church may well embrace this advocacy to further advance its mission of Moral Renewal and strengthen its fight against the Reproductive Health Bill.
No, that did not come from your archetypical manang but from the world-wise Deng Pangilinan, the double visionary chair of the Mabalacat Water District and broadcast man of dwRW 95.1.
Motels are an occasion for sin, Deng holds, unafraid – of the wife – to say his ethical opinion grounded on both experiential and empirical bases.
Unlike in the United States where motels are indeed motor hotels, intended as rest-stops for weary travelers through the length of the inter-state highways, motels hereabouts are synonymous to illicit trysts.
So have you heard of married couples going to motels just to consummate the marital act?
Motels cater specifically to adultery and same-sex adulteration, fornication and pre-marital sex, ménages a-trois, and just about every sexual perversion. Standardized as they are with all-day, all-night XXX adult channels.
Deng asks: So what are all those mirrors on the ceilings and walls of motel rooms for but to stimulate the animal desire – as watching dogs copulate, or to heighten the titillating perversion of watching oneself do it, ala Hayden Koh, with Careless Whisper as background music a readily available option?
And then, Deng notes, there is the ubiquitous notice tacked by the bedside table: “Please dial 02 for condom.” Enough to take the bejesus out of the bishops. Not too far in the future now for local motels to have their own condom-dispensing machine in every room, complete with choices of plain or multi-flavored, ribbed or dotted, small, medium and double XL.
From les liaisons dangereuses, motels in Angeles City morphed to scenes for crime operatives, worthy of the CSI television series, Miami, New York and Vegas all combined.
There is the case of the piggery farm owner from Tarlac, punctured to death, allegedly by a couple – suspected pimp and hooker, pardon the political incorrectness there – he allegedly picked up for some post-prandial delights.
Then there is the more gruesome case of the headless, naked lady found sprawled in the bathroom of another city motel. It took some days – a week? – before police found the decomposed head beneath a bridge in Mabalacat town.
In conclusion, Deng asks: So how many more heinous crimes of passion should the public endure, before the authorities come to the realization that motels are not only a threat to public morals but clear and present danger to the very lives of citizens?
Come to think of it, Deng could be right. I wonder what the motel-specialist Ashley Manabat would have to say on this.

Championing mendicancy

"IT IS irresponsible to allocate a budget for a program that is not yet fully prepared. The details may look very nice... but the implementation is certainly not that simple.”
Thus the Honorable Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, representative of the 2nd District of Pampanga, took the House floor calling “ambitious and untimely” the doubling of the budget of a poverty-alleviation program which her administration started.
Integrated in the budget of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, the budget for the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program for 2011 was raised to P21.9 billion, nearly doubling last year’s P12 billion.
The DSWD said this was principally due to the expansion of the program to cover a total of 2.3 million households from one million this year.
As provided in the CCT, each family – pre-selected among the poorest of the poor – will receive P1,400 per month for 10 months provided that the children will finish schooling. Parents are also required to regularly bring their children to health centers for immunization and preventive health care, as well as improvement in their children's nutrition and regular prenatal visits for pregnant women.
It is those conditionalities – supposed to be sine qua non for the cash – that, the CCT proponents claim, thoroughly differentiates the program from mere dole. A sort of a “social contract” binds the beneficiary to the donor, in effect.
So how adequate is government in ensuring that the beneficiaries would meet the conditionalities of their contract? The task at hand is enormous, to say the least, the former President said. “We have to prepare the allied services in health and education whose demand would increase because of the conditions of the (CCT). Now we have a program that's very good, that should be expanded but the question is by how much."
Having initiated the program, Madame GMA of course had to concede that it is “very good” and “should be expanded.” The question is only in the cost.
Other sectors however are not as optimistic of the CCT as the president-turned-solon.
As a matter of fact, even at its inception, the program – under a nomenclature other than the generic CCT – had drawn criticisms from practically all but the intended recipients.
Here’s a piece we wrote here not-too-long ago.
Culture of indolence
WITH THE government program that gives up to P1,400 monthly stipend to a family living below the poverty line, a new take on the old Chinese “fish talk” comes into being.
Government does not feed that family for only a day, it makes it cling to government for its meal for a lifetime.
This is a perpetuation of patronage politics, that has bedeviled Philippine governance from its feudal past to its so-called democratic present.
That is promoting, nay, further enhancing our culture of mendicancy.
That is propagating indolence, inertia and indigence.
Ahon Pamilyang Pinoy, the name of the dole-out program will effect the very opposite of its intent – instead of uplifting the life of the poor, it will submerge them into greater indignity, overdependence and despondence. Lubog Pamilyang Pinoy will make a most appropriate name.
To the point, and so rightly, is Caritas Manila in saying that the dole will only make the poor dependent on government.
“It is anti-poor, gives the poor no dignity, and only breeds dependency.” So said Fr. Anton Pascual, executive director of Caritas Manila.
The P5 billion allocation of the national government to fund monthly stipend for each of the country’s poorest of the poor can better serve the poor by funding livelihood and income-generating projects where they can be gainfully employed.
“The government should instead employ the poor as street sweepers, canal sanitizers and garbage collectors to teach them the value of work,” Pascual suggested.
The government can partner with non-governmental organizations, small cooperatives, and social institutions in the programming of projects – from the old self-employment assistance and small-loan packages, to more innovative income-generating activities – for the poor.
That is going by the pro-actively positive “teach him how to fish, and feed him for a lifetime” part of the old Chinese saying. It goes well too with the Christian value that labor ennobles the man.
Trabaho, hindi limos ang sagot sa kahirapan. Trabaho, hindi limos ang aangat sa karangalan ng pinaka-hikahos man sa mga mamamayan.
AS IT was then, so it is now. Government too impoverish in thought as to think of a truly alleviating, much less empowering, anti-poverty program.
Shame

On parenthood

"Married love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood…
With regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person.
With regard to man's innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that man's reason and will must exert control over them.
With regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.
Responsible parenthood, as we use the term here, has one further essential aspect of paramount importance. It concerns the objective moral order which was established by God, and of which a right conscience is the true interpreter. In a word, the exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society.
From this it follows that they are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. On the contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do corresponds to the will of God the Creator. The very nature of marriage and its use makes His will clear, while the constant teaching of the Church spells it out...
This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.
The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.
The majesty of Humanae Vitae finds greatest consonance with the exercise of our faculty of reason hence, we – the wife and I – fully subscribe to the magisterium of the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church and live by it as closely as possible.
Hence, six children – three girls in a matter of twenty-two months – were born of our unitive and procreative love.
Raising six children was taxing to say the least. Being in-between irregular jobs at some time or the other, and the wife on full-time home management was truly the pits. Yet, as the sagrado Catolico of yore, aye, the very Filipino for that matter, we take the kids as blessings from heaven.
I remember a time when the sixth child was yet to be, between us and starvation lay only ten one-peso coins. So what was there left to do but get down on our knees to pray. I got five for fare, left the half for whatever food they could still buy, and sought some friends for loans.
Finding the limited number of pals I could really count on all out somewhere, and with no means to reach them – this was long before the mobiles, I trudged my way back home feeling most forsaken – my pocket emptied of even tricycle fare.
So sorry, I told the wife, I left home with five pesos I got back with none.
In my sorrow I failed to see the radiant glow in the wife’s face, shaking me out of despair with a jubilant cry of “God heard our prayers. He sent us 10 thousand pesos!”
It turned out that our lone entry to a promo raffle of Nido milk won for us the grand prize. To top it all, it was the last day before the prize would be forefeited in favor of the sponsor, as there was no claimant to it. It was a Nido worker who happened to have read me in the local papers that led the prize-giver to my home.
Ah, how we cried – and prayed, that day of days. With the greater resolve that God will never forsake those who call on Him. Whence, whenever need overtook us, we always returned to that day and be strengthened.
With faith in God, love and trust in ourselves, no burden is too heavy to bear.
From the hardships of yesteryears, today we enjoy our “blessings” of five kids university-graduated, gainfully employed, finding their own places in the sun. The youngest is a junior in college. We are blessed with two grandchildren, and another one on the way.
In the current battlegrounds of reproductive health, of population control, of so-called freedom of choice, we find our marriage a celebration of the supremacy of the Church’s position: responsible parenthood negates reproductive health as pushed by the state.
Modesty be damned now, we look at our family as a testimony to the true majesty of Humanae Vitae.

The Great Leap

IN 1958, Mao Zedong launched a national program to modernize the Chinese economy with the express objective of rivaling that of the United States by 1988. It was called the Great Leap Forward.
Mao’s target fell short by 20 years, and China’s modernization and coming into its own as global economic megapower hardly attributed to him, but even considered as a repudiation of him: the credit readily bestowed on the liberalizing Deng Xiao-ping. The same Deng vilified in Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a “capitalist roader.”
The Great Leap Backward, so was Mao’s program ridiculed, its centerpiece program of backyard steel industry with as many as 600,000 furnaces backfiring with sub-standard produce, and the corollary agricultural program ending in a massive failure that led to starvation causing the death of millions.
In 1959, the Great Helmsman himself acknowledged failure: “The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must analyse your own responsibility. If you have to fart, fart. You will feel much better for it.”
No farting now, but all croaking in the City of San Fernando with once Mao’s comrade-in-thought Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez declaring his domain’s own Great Leap Forward thus: "Kokak, kokak, Sisigpo la reng tugak, Kayantabe ya ing Syudad." Okay, that translates to “Ribbit, ribbit, the frogs are a-leaping, along with the city.”
For the strides, nay, the leaps and bounds with which the City of San Fernando managed to attain a level of socio-economic development that has yet to find parallel in any other metropolis in the country, the city appropriated for its symbol not the soaring eagle nor the roaring lion, but the lowly frog.
On one hand, it is a fitting representation of the humble beginnings and innate humility of the man who leads the city. The story of Mayor Oca finds parallelism to that fairy tale about the frog turning to a prince at the kiss of a princess: the plebeian Oca, aka Ka Jasmin, at destiny’s kiss transformed to congressman and then mayor, yet ever in love with his people.
On the other, it is a proper recognition of the critical role the frog plays in local history and culture.
So it is said that the pangs of starvation were never felt in Pampanga – not in the days of the Philippine Revolution and the War against Imperial America, not even during the Japanese Occupation – thanks to frogs, which along with the

kamaru

(mole crickets) provided a staple, if protein rich, diet.
From ageing memory comes a ditty from our youth: ‘Kikildap, kikildap, sisigpo la ring tugak… (With the lightning, the frogs are leaping…)” thereby signaling the start of the frog-catching season.
And from pamate-danup (stop-gap to hunger), the lowly frog has found center place in the Kapampangan culinary culture with such delights as betute (stuffed frogs), tinola (broth of frog with green papaya and pepper leaves), among others.
And so these heady days of October, the frog is most honored in the City of San Fernando with its own three-day festival – Pyestang Tugak – complete with street-dancing and free-dance competitions, frog-mascot contests, frog races and the lundag-tugak show-jumping.
On this the sixth year of the festival, a "frog chorale" contest will be staged at SM City Pampanga. Participants will perform any song they wish but have to replace the lyrics with croaks of "kokak."
A regular feature in the fest, paduasan tugak, catching frogs with rod and line will be held at the wet grasslands behind the Heroes Hall. The winner determined by the largest frog caught.
Capping the activities is the Kokak-tober Fest music jam in front of city hall.
The Frog Festival in a way serves as a fitting triumph – in the Roman tradition – for the city’s elevation to the 2010 Palladium Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame, the “gold standard of strategic performance” given to successful and high-performing private and public organizations all over the world.
Said Mayor Oca: “This prestigious award not only helps reaffirm the status of San Fernando as a world-class city, but also raises our nation’s pride by having globally recognized local government units.”
Making it to the hall of fame was no walk in the park, with Mayor Oca harnessing the resources of the city, mobilizing the citizenry and partnering with the private sector in applying the Performance Governance System of the Harvard-pioneered Balanced Scorecard management system to achieve and sustain breakthrough performance results.
Truly great leaps forward – on to progress – the frog, Mayor Oca, and the City of San Fernando have all made.
Go, croak.