Citizenship as defined in Wikipedia:

Citizenship is membership in a political community (originally a city but now usually a state) and carries with it rights to political participation;….

Citizenship often also implies working towards the betterment of one’s community through participation, volunteer work, and efforts to improve life for all citizens.

Citizenship entails duties, rights, and privileges. The rights of Filipino citizens are guaranteed in the 1987 Constitution, and the duties of citizens are not stated in the Charter. Rather, the drafters of the Charter thought that citizens know their duties, and that exercise of such duties come from the citizen’s sense of obligation because of the rights given to him. The drafters trusted that the Filipino citizen would be driven by such sense.

The Abueva Constitutional Commission thought otherwise. Its draft Constitution has a Bill of Duties, “to inculcate in citizens the responsible use of their rights”, to quote PCIJ. You may download the PCIJ’s matrix of comparison between the Abueva draft and the current Charter here.

I do not agree that the Charter needs an overhaul; I admit some passages need revision, but a new Charter is not needed. But a Bill of Duties appeals to me, due to the Filipino tendency to ignore his duties as a citizen, which I think is due to laziness (though this is debatable).

One of the evidence of the Filipino’s disregard for his duties as a citizen is an exhortation by a contributor to Inq7.net’s Viewpoints section:

Let’s forget the politics and leave it to the politicians in whom we entrusted our votes.

That is precisely the problem we are in deep sh*t nowadays. We only practice our political duty during elections. It’s like elect and forget. This is terribly wrong.

The people’s disdain on politics is understandable but unfortunate. The common notion that politics is dirty is fallacious (fallacy of composition for starters). But the disdain should not discourage people from exercising their duties as citizens of this country. The Kennedy cliche is tiring to hear, but it is too true, even for these times.

Some of us opted “take a vacation from being a Filipino.” Why don’t they just resign from being a Filipino? While I don’t take it against them – surrender is an option, after all – it is an escapist attitude that is too Filipino, in my mind. Many Filipinos would rather leave the country. Yet, when settled in a foreign land, they still consider themselves Filipinos – even if they carry a new, non-Philippine passport. They have the rights of the Filipinos as guaranteed by the 1987 Charter through the Dual Citizenship Law (a law that I do not agree with), and without the attendant duties thereof. Which sucks, of course.

Anyway, back to the topic. You want clean politics? You have to be involved. Leaving things to politicians is ignoring your duties as citizen of this country. So, if the Abueva Charter is approved, beware of Article Five – The Bill of Duties. When it’s passed (which is a long shot), you will be liable for culpable violation of the Constitution.

Leave politics to politicians, and you might just as well shut up if your congressman steals millions from his pork barrel or the sitting prexy spends government money for his reelection.

Please do your part. Elect only those whose heart is into service. Elect those who you think is capable and honest. Come election time, perform election education campaigns. Support anti-political dynasty bills currently in the pipeline. There are so many things you can do, and leaving politics to operators is not one of them. (Sure it is, but to your peril – and ours, too.)

Requiescat in Pace

To those who died in the Leyte Landslide of February 17, 2006.

There is a difference between what you have observed and what you have experienced.

In an ideal world, you detach yourself from the experience if you want to get a valid and rational observation. The scientific method insists on this. Why? Because you have to get all sides of the story; you have to get all empirical data that will prove the theory. This is specially true with the social sciences. Historians and sociologists don’t present their experiences; they observe people, they ask questions, they present their observations. You have to be detached so that your observations will be free from the taint of irrationality that an experience may bring.

I hate the detachment. It reduces humanity into quantifiable variables and unrealistic generalizations. It refuses to acknowledge the human dimension of the problem at hand.

Ironically, by detaching oneself from the experience, you are making an incomplete observation. True, there will be no true completeness; comprehensiveness is the best term. I believe that to present a comprehensive observation, you should immerse yourself in the experience.

True, there are times you have to really be detached, because you wouldn’t want to experience such. That’s why I don’t comment on things that I can only observe from a distance – stealing, perhaps, or kidnapping, or murder. I can comment about lying, because I was dishonest in some points of my life.
***
Poverty as a root cause of social problems has been reduced to theoretical discussions, turning the concrete into abstract. Employing tools from sociology to psychology to history, poverty is now just a subject to be discussed, debated, and quizzed. The poor are now lab rats, subject to experiments on how they behave; they are just statistic that no one bothers to understand. In the end, nothing is produced; in the end, it will be all words and rhetoric. Simple: poverty has been observed, and is being observed, with detachment.

If you believe in the totality of things, then you must be ready to accept fault for things that you are a part of; if you are part of a system, and that system has problems, then you must accept the fact that you contribute to the problems (even if you think you don’t). That’s why I am tired of reading treatises on poverty that pins the blame on anybody. Poverty is a problem of the society as a system; I am part of that system, ergo I contribute to that problem. Hence I am at fault. Denying that you are not part of the problem is observing with detachment. And definitely you are not part of the solution, either.
***
We live in a world of denial. People dismiss poverty as a cause of problems because people feel powerless about it. Some of us even deny it exists – how many times have we seen beggars and pretended we did not see them?

It’s not good to give alms. But have you done anything that will contribute to alleviating the effects of the problem? Unfortunately, sitting in ivory towers, blaming, and living in denial are not solutions.

I have learned two things in the past few days:

• The Calibrated Preemptive Response (CPR) is only applied to anti-Arroyo rallies.
• The government can finish investigations as fast as it want it to.

Questions:

• They say people began camping at ULTRA Monday, January 30, 2006. A lot of people were there, in a public street. Why didn’t the police apply CPR?
• If it can finish investigations in 72 hours, how come it takes the government years to solve other crimes, specially corruption?

Also: Pinoys love being in the cameras. And giving them the mike will give them heaven. However, they shoot before they think. Evidence: Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez and Interior Undersecretary Marius Corpus.

Atty. Lambino to Cito Beltran’s Straight Talk: We are all at fault. I agree.

A stinging indictment by the youth of their elders.

However, it does not absolve the youth. Unfortunately, the youth will clean up the crap that their elders had made. I suggest they begin now, as it is a lot of trash to clean. Otherwise, they’ll just repeat the errors of their elders.

A sad reflection of poverty in the Philippines is the Stampede of February 4, 2006.

Wowowee is one of the flagship noontime shows of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest network. Promising large prizes and highlighting the plight of its winners, many people saw it as their hope to get out of the hellish life that poverty brings. Thousands of people line up in the night to have a chance in getting in the studio for the next day’s show, and hoping to get the top prize.

The show would have celebrated its anniversary by doing a show at the Philsports Arena (formerly ULTRA) today, and thousands of people lined up last night just to get a chance of getting inside the arena. Getting in the arena gives you the chance of winning the top pot. Then, the shocking tragedy happened.

Poverty is a sad reality in this country, and despite the indifference of the affluent, its reality cannot be denied, and its existence will be highlighted. The massive crowd that lined up the streets near the ABS-CBN studios, and indeed, those who lined up at Philsports Arena, is proof of poverty. People see game shows like Wowowee as their last hope, the ticket out of the muck of poverty.

The host lamented the deaths and stated that they only wanted to entertain and give hope. Some individuals chided ABS-CBN for exploiting the poor in order to get higher ratings. One weblog even berated the company for such poor planning and organizing. The said comments are rather unfair; who wanted such tragedy to happen?

ABS-CBN has announced that it will shoulder all medical and funeral expenses of the victims of the Stampede. Well and good. At least it is not shirking on its responsibility, although some skeptics may – again – claim that this action is just damage control.

ABS-CBN should rethink its concepts about Wowowee. It has created false hopes and unduly contributed to the vicious cycle of poverty, feeding to the fast-buck thinking. The intentions are good; their effects are, in the long run, not.