principles & politics

I am stealing the wise words of this impressive young warrior friend. 

On good days I take in our cityscape - its natural dips and rises, its mix of high rise buildings and tiny houses, its trees, streets and people, its cultures and politics - and my heart is filled to bursting with love and gratitude.

On bad days I take in our cityscape - its natural dips and rises, its mix of high rise buildings and tiny houses, its trees, streets and people, its cultures and politics - and my heart feels crushed by anger and frustration.

overflowing slum

Any city will do this to its residents on any day - but all city leaders owe it to their citizens to ensure there is more good than bad in our lives. Sadly, the world over, our leaders are failing to deliver - the outcome is our quality of life is now at risk. 

ghost dancers

This is an homage to Mary Oliver and her poem Ghosts - her moving sermon for the lost bison herds of the American pioneer west, killed to starve the Native American tribes out.

It is also a eulogy to the sakadas of Negros Island - the migrant Filipino farm laborers who watched their children helpless as they starved to death, at the height of the Marcos martial law sugar plunder.

Bayan Negros protest streamer says, "behind the smiles of MassKara lie hunger and poverty."

In a decade of deliberate historical distortion the dictator's heirs have returned - brandishing their ill-gotten wealth in a bid to retell the tale of their ugly, nasty past into a burnished fable of their own making.