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Farewell To My Past Lives
As we progress in life we take on what forms we need to survive. In doing so we hope to thrive when and where life permits but often we do so just to fight for the opportunity to see another day. On this soil, in this system, that struggle means living as what is necessary. The pain of having those forms forced upon us is an inescapable reality. To be born a Filipina means we are born to navigate in a world where patriarchy touches every aspect of our existence in ways that seldom benefit us. As a cis female, I can only speak to my own experiences. As an addict struggling with sobriety, I can only include my lived experiences through the filter of my own views of them. In writing this I wish to accept the past forms I have lived and let every version of me that came before know that some peace came from their endurance.
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I have lived as the ate in my youth. A role I feel deprived me of much the same tenderness my siblings were granted and yet understand their experiences are lives I can only emphasize with but not fully know. In that understanding I accept that the many times I have felt resentment for being forced to play parent to them that I can now wish I gave them enough of myself to know my love in my later absence. I wish my childhood had been longer and more complete. I wish my time as the oldest sister would have felt less stressful. Yet I also wish I could live it over to fix the areas I feel now I made mistakes in. To this version of myself I can only say that I wish I could hold her and show love to her in the ways that were denied to her. To let her know that tenderness is not weakness and abuse is not “tough love”.
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I have lived as a doll for men who took more from me than what I feel can ever be replaced. This version of me is a silent one that haunts every other form I have taken. It is one that strived to be perfect in faith, dedication to family, and perfection in all ways demanded of it. I struggle to assign my femininity to this part of me because that is what made me vulnerable in this form. It was the forced role in which violation after violation took place. A role in which I learned to be ashamed of my body and existence in it. For so many reasons this form is one that screams in deafening pain yet has been made to be silent for fear of what might come if its voice was permitted to it. To this form of me I now say that I am sorry for what was done to you, to us. I am sorry I cannot heal us. And I am working to restore the voice of that time in which I have kept you so we can work through that anguish you, we have lived silently trapped inside.
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I have lived as the human embodiment of trash when put aside for other’s convenience. This life taught me to depend on myself and reject relationships because I felt safer alone. It taught me that I am dirty, unlovable and less than human. I felt like a rat or ipis, always running around to find something to survive on while avoiding people. I felt unsafe in everything. I could not relieve myself or bathe safely. I could not sleep safely. I could not exist safely. And yet this is the life in which I had my first period. This was the time I matured physically and mentally against my will and without support. To you I have no words except you did not deserve this. You were not trash, you were not dirty, you were not unlovable… you were abandoned. I wish I could live two lives at once and go back to your time to save you from all the indignities we endured. You deserved a childhood. You deserved to live freely and securely in a loving home. At least you know now that there are people who love you.
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Several times in my life I have lived outside my body while fighting to preserve it. During assaults I often felt disconnected from the flesh I wanted to no longer feel being violated. In surreal flashes of memory I remember the instinct of clawing, biting and kicking to be free. Wishing sometimes that if my resistance did not end the attack then maybe my spirit might finally leave once the attacker ended me. This version of myself I cannot say farewell to. As painful as her memory is, I know that such attacks could still happen. In this culture where my body is valued only for how it can be abused, this version of myself remains forever lingering over my shoulder. I know I am vulnerable. This version whispers on the back of my neck when it senses I am in need of her. It pains my soul she has to exist, her frantic heart ever vibrating against my spine. I can only thank her for those times when we have switched places and she endures what my mind cannot.
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There are so many other versions of me that I cling to, upon who’s wings I flutter about when the world in which live demands it. There are new versions of me born as well. Such as the tita I have learned to be for a little boy who has unknowingly managed to change my life just by being in it. These new versions today feel much calmer and at peace than the older versions of me. Yet for all the differences in them, none of these parts can truly be separated from each other. I could not today live this life without all the other ones that came before it. In recognizing those past parts, those times that no longer feel like the same me that lives today, I want peace. And in time, through working on giving peace to them as well, I hope to find it.
This post is being shared in hopes that those with similar experiences understand that the isolating feelings that come with these struggles need not be surrendered to. You are not alone in dealing with past traumas and we want to encourage finding constructive ways of healing from those past experiences. The author of this post found help in therapy and support from our community. This post comes from just one exercise in that process of healing.
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Tiger Stripes and Butterflies
Part of the ‘The Filipino Child and its Enemies’ series.
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This post will be discussing in unfiltered language aspects of sexual abuse, predation and child abuse/neglect. It contains content that some might find disturbing.
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There are lines carved into my body that never should have become part of me. Scars that form hidden stories that for more than a decade I have not wanted to talk about. Some of those lines take extra effort to hide. Others are so intimately part of my flesh that nobody else will ever see them if I have a say in it. But each stripe is there and each one can never be erased. I carry them because the system I was born into sees me as less than human. A mere product to be enjoyed, abused and discarded. A once child, now a woman, incapable of being fully valued for who I am, who I was, and what I wish to become. I am a product of Philippine society beyond the happy little lies we tell ourselves.
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I’ve written some about this in the past post “Upon Butterfly Wings”. It was written quickly and with as little detail as necessary because every time I talk about this subject, this part of my life, I feel deep senses of shame, anger, rage and sorrow. But to me, for why I want to speak these things, this betrayal of our children in our communities is something we as Filipinos constantly exert so much effort to erase. Instead of taking on a thought that it would be better to torch the entire jungle to flush out the predators, we act as caretakers of the environment in which the predators thrive most. Offering up our youth as sacrifices in exchange for the comfort of the status quo.
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The key aspect of the ecosystem in which predation occurs in our society is the near blindness with which we are trained to conceive the notion of authority. In our schools we are taught that Filipino values are those of the Church and Christianity. That rebellion is akin to witchcraft. We are conditioned, groomed, to believe that certain structures in our communities are so vital to our collective existence that we are to submit to the will of the authority figure even when something about their commands feels wrong. We use traditional concepts of belonging alongside Catholic concepts of god to form a perverse patriotism that binds us together even when together means alongside our predators.
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I was not entirely naïve about what was done to me. While I did initially believe what my first predator said about me being sinful and needing to make penance to repent, I did become aware of how I had become trapped. I understood soon that there was no god to plead to and no penance to be made so all the abuse would stop. My predator knew the system well and had lured me in through senses of duty to my faith. He had isolated me and forced me to carry the cross of shame he had constructed for me in every sermon and filthy secret whispered in my ear. Every touch, every violation, felt like chains being added to the crushing weight as what little faith I retained slipped away. So I began to release my pain alongside my blood. Flirting with the idea of death, I opened my legs where he had forced his hands and began to make my first tiger stripes along my thighs.
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For two years leading up to my thirteenth birthday I kept cutting myself. Each slice of the flesh being less of a relief as I knew these razor marks would not bleed out the filthy emotions and thoughts that I wanted relief from. Each time I became more comfortable with the pain and more desiring of death itself. My dreams became images of peeling off my skin and walking away from life. To transform into something that no man could touch and no hands could violate. Sometimes I arose with the wings of a bat and flew away. Most of the time I sprang forth as a tiger ready to exact my revenge.
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Revenge. How often I dreamed of it. I didn’t want to stab him. I wanted to use my fingernails like claws and my teeth like fangs as I tore every shred of his flesh from his muscles, every muscle from his bones, and the very marrow from inside his bones themselves. I dreamed of it so often and yet I knew I would never have it. Neither revenge or justice. I was in my mind a dirty waste of flesh that nobody would fight for. And I knew that despite how much I wanted to, I couldn’t fight back either.
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As the abuse escalated I became aware of where he was going. I did not want nor feel I could endure any more. So I decided as my thirteenth birthday approached I would finally cut myself free. It wasn’t my own thought though. He had seen the cuts on my thighs on multiple occasions and mocked me by saying I should just do it to my wrist instead. In his mockery he even instructed me how to slice my wrist properly to end my life. Perhaps he didn’t believe that I no longer had faith in heaven or fear of damnation. So taking that butterfly knife, I made the first of what would eventually become three tiger stripes on my wrist.
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It bled more than I had seen any of my previous cuts bleed. For the first time I felt fear that maybe finally I was leaving this body.
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My abuse was made possible not because nobody else knew about it. Several members of the Church in my hometown knew I was being molested. Nobody said anything. It wasn’t because I didn’t speak up. I had begged not to be taken to that place and used what language I understood at the time to say why. Nobody listened. Instead the culture of respect for authority, something that in the ‘Solid North’ is practically maintained like a second religion, made possible for a predator to use me like his personal toy while no other adult intervened. I was visible. I was heard. But nothing happened to save me. And I knew that nothing would happen.
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The second leading reason my abuse was made possible was the deeply felt sense of pride our culture nurtures and seeks to maintain at all cost. My family would end up sending me to Manila under the lie of some tita I would be living with because it saved the image of the family and avoided soiling the image of the local Church. The community was supposed to be a place where these sorts of sins were not tolerated. These were people who went to mass all week long, not just holidays. People there do not do such filthy acts even if it is proven that they do. Gossips could whisper the facts of the crimes committed against me so long as I alone was blamed. To save the image of the community and my family, I was excommunicated and exiled. To this day I am like the living dead, in eternal purgatory, because of what was done to me.
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We raise children to see how the community works and accept the vast violations against the vulnerable as normal. We create worlds in which some lives are of lesser value and we tell them that this is acceptable. All while knowing that the predators amongst us are being spared the community’s wrath and justice for these children will never be found. We do all of this because it offers the illusion of our lies being true. The Filipino is good. The community is strong and healthy. We are all one. Until we are not.
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The last time I saw my father he was hitting me and kicking me for what I had done. The wound on my wrist was still healing when he abandoned me in Tondo. For years I would remember how the man who’s blood flows through my veins was capable of attacking me because I was blamed for the abuse I endured. It taught me to endure all the times afterwards when police, government workers and other men in positions of authority stuck their hands in my pants or up my shirt. It cannot be understated how little a person feels when taught that they are of so little value that they can be thrown away. He might have been frustrated and angry with what was then expected of him to do with me. But I learned a lesson that harmed me and nearly killed me repeatedly year after year to follow.
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Butterfly wings got traded out for needles. Anything to help me leave this body for whatever amount of time I could. When nobody was around to abuse me, I would deliver the pain I felt I deserved.
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Today I am the product of a system that saw me, still sees me, as less than human. There are untold number of children in our country with stories worse than mine, same as mine, or thankfully not as severe as mine. All because we maintain systems that enable predators from the lowest levels of our society all the way up to the halls of power which govern us. I speak of my life because nobody should have to live through what I have. We are a culture that talks about family as though we are the only ones on earth that truly understand it. I know that how we speak of our family values are all lies that comfort us. We are a country that claims to be strong because of our resilience and communal bonds. I know the true depths of what torment we put the outcasts through just so we can talk about resiliency. I speak of my pain because our community desperately needs to torch the jungle and rebuild it without the predators.
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I will be writing more posts like this and more will be focused on how I believe we should think and act on issues facing our communities. As somebody from the bottom ranks of this society, all punches I make go upwards. And many of you reading this are upwards from my position.
☆Anarchy Pinay
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“Is god good?”
“Is god good,” the smallest and most serious woman I have ever known asked while handing me coffee. Just a short time before I had been listening to her talk about her day between the interpretations of calling ming ming to each new cat that showed up from the adjacent alleyway. But with that question I knew that the conversation was about to challenge me, the only member of the group who identifies as Christian at least some of the time.
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Sitting down with Anarchy Pinay and discussing anything is perhaps one of my favorite things. Of all the members of our group, she is the smallest and least likely of us to be mistaken for the cartoonish trope of an anarchist. Yet each of us have come to respect and seek out her views on society, culture, religion and anarchy when trying to develop our own understandings. Which is why when I decided to think more deeply about god and Christianity in our culture, I decided to sit down with the one person I knew would unapologetically utilize all her views on the subject to help me shape my own.
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“How do we even go about measuring a being’s good or evil attributes when we cannot prove if that being even exists,” AP said before pausing to sip her own coffee and pet the newest cat. “If the only way we have to prove that something of god’s goodness exists is by how the alleged word of god influences those who believe, then is god good?”
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I have always assumed when I was younger that the question should be “am I good” in relation to how I follow god’s commandments. That is how we were always taught. To measure our worthiness of being called good, or acceptable, in the eyes of god by how well we follow the instructions offered in the Bible. Listening to AP it felt challenging to switch to her perspective and yet fascinating how she could question the existence of god while simultaneously attempting to measure the worthiness of god to be accepted at all.
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“When a Christian claims to love their god, love others as that god commands, yet finds reasons in the same book to justify the suffering and punishment of others – is that contradiction in the love god says the Christian must show others not a fault of god as well? Because when asked why suffering is necessary, why punishment is necessary, the Christian inevitably turns to god’s word and quotes the harshest words imaginable to make the most inexcusable torture of others somehow acceptable… to both them and god. So is god good,” AP asked again. “For example, the question of homosexuality in Christianity. Here we have a god that claims to have loved us from the moment he makes us and yet also says that the manner in which he made the homosexual is sinful… requiring eternal torture. Christian after Christian uses the book this god is supposed to have written… inspired… as justification of their bigotry towards the homosexual community. So we have a god that is capable of making the entire universe, according to the Christian faith, and can make it in any way he wishes, but decides to make some of that creation in ways he then claims need punished for existing. Is that god a loving god worthy of praise? Is that god a good god?”
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“But if our Church says that we should love everyone, no matter what sin we think they may or may not have committed… doesn’t that speak to the love god commanded us to show,” I instantly knew AP would counter this and yet a part of me wanted to give god a chance to be ‘good’ in this conversation.
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AP picked up the kitten at her feet and held it out before placing it on her lap, “If I am a goddess and I can speak this cat into existence while claiming I love it, what should I be expected to do once the cat manifests? I love cats very much. Even when they are not my own cat, I love them. But if I am like your god then I have to notice that this cat is very bad. It has cuts from fighting. It probably has worms or something like that. It is not a desirable cat. So do I let it go hungry or homeless? Do I not give it love in the same way I would a more friendly cat that loves me back? Do I wait until it dies of hunger and then punish it even more for all eternity just because it didn’t make me as happy as the cats that showed me affection?
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“If I did any of these things then you would be justified to say I am cruel. What kind of being spends so much time invested in actively causing pain to another being? Not a good one. Yet just like this cat, just like the homosexual is talked about in Christianity, I think a good being would have to act much differently than god is described… how Christianity says god is.
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“If I am kind to all other people, sacrifice of whatever I have so that others can share in it too, and show love in both my words and actions… if I do all this but do not accept your god as savior, does your god not also punish me?”
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Of all the commandments the one I was taught to uphold above all others was the ‘Golden Rule’. That if we do this one command, to treat others as we would want to be treated, in all things, then we inevitably are inclined to show the love of god in our actions and words. Yet here I was with AP asking if a person could do this one command despite not believing in god then why would that person be damned for eternity. And I had no answer for that.
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AP continued in a mixture of Ilocano and English, translating for me whenever her eagerness to talk moved her to speak in her language rather than Filipino or English first. All I could do was listen.
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“Going back to how we can only measure god by that which he inspires in his believers,” AP’s hands animated her sentences as her thoughts flowed out “we have to question what good is found in the way the Church encourages devotion to god. That in teaching us to be obedient, to be unquestioning of the word of god, the Christianity we experience is authoritarian rather than loving. The lessons talk about an empathetic love for others and yet are intertwined with notions of subservience and fear of divine punishment in the next life. Where is the good in the god presented by the god of the Catholic Church or even your Church if the only reason to adhere to the message is the threat of hell?”
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I remembered when we had worked on the group’s post on why Christianity was forced by the Spanish. It was AP that had insisted the post focus on the relationship between religious indoctrination into submission to authority and the Spanish demand of racial hierarchy and the Indio submission to the Spanish crown’s authority. So even though she moved on from that point without talking about it then, I knew she understood that I had listened to her on that point before.
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“If the Christian sense of morality is forever tied to self-preservation and escaping hell, then can the god that inspired that moral code through threat of punishment be considered good,” AP never gave her opinion clearly, only ever asking the questions that were too uncomfortable to answer. “So if the ‘love’ demonstrated is only encouraged by threat of torture… the other person being shown ‘love’ is still assumed to go to hell if they are a ‘sinner’… then we can only measure the Christian approach to demonstrating love as that of false love… a demonstration of it that is void of substance. Yet the non-believer who manages to behave in all the same ways of Jesus is cast into hell?”
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Sitting in a brief moment of silence as AP lit her cigarette, I decided to speak up.
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“What can we determine ‘good’ is then?”
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Taking two puffs from her cigarette, AP answered, “If Jesus is the Christian example of purity, of goodness, then we can assume that living a life in that way would be ‘good’. But as I asked, do we need the story of Jesus to be able to live by a similar set of principles? I don’t think we do. I think we can look in the poor community here and find a Jesus if we wanted. And that morality in the way the Christian Bible describes it can be found across cultures… with or without Christianity.
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“What is ‘good’ is subjective. But we can agree that showing kindness, compassion, cooperation with and a recognition of the interdependence of each of us are some of the major ways in which we decide if somebody is ‘good’ or not. We use those same measures to define what makes a leader. And therefore we should use them to decide if that leader has inspired them in those who follow them.”
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“If I want to be a good person and a good Christian, what would make you think I am (both),” I asked fully expecting to be crushed by a reply that it was impossible to be both at the same time.
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“Can you imagine a god… an afterlife… without a hell,” AP replied with a kindness to her voice. “If you can reconcile the parts of faith which enable judgement and condemnation of others… even passively… then I think that is the point you can engage with others… those of us who do not believe… in a truly loving manner. Because it is not loving to simply be kind to people while you also hold onto verses which damn us. A good person does all those things I just said while never once holding themselves above or separate from the other. That is how I think a person shows the love your faith claims to have and wants to share.”
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The conversation would continue on for another hour or more before I could tell AP was getting tired and needed rest. Each and every moment spent learning from each other has been among the most treasured memories that will forever shape my views and hopefully influence me for the better. It has over the years been inspiring to me that despite our many differences we have always made time to exchange views and knowledge. The kindness and patience with which AP engages is something I’ve learned is not common enough and should never be taken for granted. So as I keep thinking about this conversation, thank you to Anarchy Pinay for being a sister and friend to all of us who work with this page.
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Contributed by Totoy
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The Bee & Our Little Man Syndrome Style Patriotism
Parts of our culture become cornerstones to how we identify as a member of the group, in this case our country and larger surrounding community. In a culture that has been degraded by hyper-consumerism and American capitalism, the actual foundation of culture gets eroded and substituted for trivial surface level elements built atop of what once was. Where food, a shared part of culture that digs deeper than country or ethnic group identity and instead goes all the way to the family level, holds a well deserved cornerstone status to how we define culture; it has over time been reduced in quality of how we define it. We can all agree on traditional dishes that we would justifiably feel slighted if they were perverted by outsiders. But in our own community we have over time allowed the culture of Americanisms to redefine for us what is Filipino food. And this is where the Bee enters. An invasive species, of sorts. It arrives with the modern birth of consumerism and the post-colonial fixation on imitate the old colonial master as a path to “modernizing” Filipino culture itself. So we allowed in the Bee and all its so-called food. We made it into more than just a mascot for some fast-food establishment, we made it into a symbol of “pinoy pride”. That image became something we sacrificed entire portions of our salaries to just so we ourselves could be seen consuming the junk our community idolized. Birthdays, Christenings, anniversaries, holidays, fiestas; they all became associated with offerings purchased from the Bee. Having the cheap plastic trash offered in alternative happy meals became store bought childhood joy twisted into a tangible token of false patriotism. And now we have entire generations trained to be angry if any foreigner ever insults the Bee.
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So why do we worship the Bee? Why is the Bee any more important to us than that Kentucky gentleman or the clown the old colonial master sent over?
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People my age, those with a certain level of privilege, were raised to measure how well their family was doing financially by how often they got treated to the Bee’s food. That childhood indoctrination goes a long way in understanding how we were trained to be disproportionately attached to a symbol of ethnocentric pride rather than deciding if we liked the taste of the Bee’s food independently of any outside input at all. However, to momentarily take the Bee out of this, we can also look at it differently by thinking of how we would feel about seeing a foreigner say they hate spaghetti verses how we would feel if they said they hate ‘Filipino spaghetti’. A part of us might rationally stop and understand that the foreigner has different taste preferences formed from their own cultural background and upbringing. But have that ‘Filipino’ added in front of the word ‘spaghetti’ and suddenly fewer of us are willing to stop and think about that. And this is where we bring the Bee back in. Because the Bee is to many of us a subconsciously substituted symbol for how we identify with our Filipino identity. This being directly influenced by how we were trained as children to associate our worth as Filipinos, as members of the group, with that of the Bee’s image. For some in the diaspora the Bee could very well be a large portion of how their families connected with something, anything deemed to be part of Filipino culture. For many of us here in the Philippines the Bee holds that economic status symbol position. Both show to some degree an unhealthy relationship with our collective identity and how the Bee factors into that identity.
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The Americanization of global south economies means that on the surface level the Philippine adoption of mass consumerism appears to be not so unique. Many of our neighbors also have their own local fast-food establishments their own communities hold less than healthy loyalties to. But the Bee also has its roots in colonialism and the United State’s lingering footprint on our lives. We are a society that has sacrificed entire portions of our cultural heritage and roots to be able to adapt to and adopt the Westernized “modern” version of so-called civilization. While we still drag out terms like bayanihan to give a native dress-up approach to our imitations of Western culture and government models, we don’t understand or live by the virtues those words and ideals arose alongside. The Bee embodies every cancerous notion of American capitalism to the letter. It grinds our workers to dust and spits out the least nutritious product it can make while taking in billions every single year. And yet due to our inclination to sacrifice ourselves, our people, for the chance to be like the West as best we can; we allow every abuse that comes with the hollow symbol that is the Bee. We do it and then claim to be proud because the Bee is part of what the colonial system made us to be. Submissive and disposable.
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That joyless chicken and spaghetti meal isn’t the only way we exercise our little man syndrome when trying to get our “pinoy pride” fix. We see the same grasping at pride every single time another Filipino makes a personal accomplishment. Or worse yet, whenever somebody with no connection to the Philippines, no desire to have that connection either, can be assumed to have a Filipino ancestor (no matter how remote the relation might have been) has an internationally recognized achievement. That collective attempt at taking the achievement of the tokenized, and soon forgotten, Filipino of the moment and reapply it to ourselves instead is also a symptom of our collective inferiority complex. We need those symbols of greatness in part because we are the products of a culture that feels in its bones the centuries of oppression and denial of our unique worth. We are always some other community’s “little brown brother”. So when something we can associate with our own identity is something we can consider to be great, we cling to it with irrational pride.
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So much of what I have written for this page over the years comes back to the unanswerable question “what does it mean to be Filipino”. It cannot under any circumstances be allowed to be reduced to some cartoonish Bee or oily chicken with sweet spaghetti. But it also cannot forever be tied to a sense of inferiority or being less than another group just because our history. What is special about ourselves is always tied partially to what is unique about the culture and people we come from. The Bee didn’t come from communal struggle against poverty, hunger, want, exploitation and resisting of both colonial and local governmental abuses. But many of us did. The bond we share to the family, by blood or by choice, that supports us is often our first building block to defining what it has meant to be Filipino for us. The immediate community we are engaged with, to whatever degree we wish or must, is the next building block we find in answering that question. And finally we have to measure for ourselves what our association with our ethnic and national identity means as we expand the circle. In doing this we should strip away the superficial, like the Bee or even the flag, and see the cultural bonds we share to our people rather than what symbols we have been taught to focus on.
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As a people we are only as small as we choose to be and only as special as we work towards on our own.
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Godless & Filipino?
When asked what it means to be Filipino there is a common response given of associating Catholicism or the Abrahamic god to that of Filipino identity. This response is so pervasive that celebrations of Filipino culture both here and abroad regularly include religious imagery as a staple of Philippine heritage. It is one of the most invasive remnants of colonial influence in festivals, civic engagements and almost all aspects of daily life to this day. Yet what happens if you are a godless heathen in this land of Christian idols and churches on every other street? Are you somehow less of a Filipino if you reject the god that the white invader forced upon your ancestors?
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In many ways Philippine society goes out of its way to perpetuate the violence of Christian subjugation of the non-Christian Filipino. From prayers offered up in grocery stores (SM in particular) to religious speech used in the laws that govern us, the reminder is always there that being godless in our own land is to be a lesser pinoy. But it doesn’t stop even when you enter “spiritualist” areas of the supposedly more liberal left either. Decolonization rhetoric in the homeland often just switches out the Abrahamic god for idealized versions of indigenous gods. And the diasporic decolonial spaces often take the evangelizing nature of Christianity and apply it to messaging which heavily insinuates that we can only truly decolonize by embracing animist or native religious beliefs of ancestors we might not actually have direct connections to. To be truly godless, an absolute rejection of religious ideals and deities, means finding extremely narrow spaces in Philippine society in which we can exist as both atheist and Filipino at the same time.
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For us as a group this topic comes up frequently since of the core members, roughly half of us are either atheists or agnostic. I myself am not fully decided but lean heavily towards the agnostic stance on religious beliefs. So we frequently discuss the freedom from religion and often question spirituality in general. Amongst ourselves we find the usual tension found in such taboo topics is removed because we don’t encounter the same judgmental attitudes among each other as we do if ever such a conversation arises with other people. This allows us to reflect on time spent in values classes in school and enforced religious observances in family and classroom settings. It also offers us space in which to discuss the abuse received at the hands of allegedly devout church figures and family members.
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One of the judgements people often make is that we ended up being ‘godless’ because of that abuse. To which they often add that we should try to separate god from the abuse inspired and carried out in his name. I can say confidently that while the abuse I endured did play a role in my understanding of the world, it wasn’t the catalyst for that change. I did not begin to question god’s existence as a direct result of those assaults either. And therefore it is unnecessary for me to offer a deity I no longer believe in the privilege of being excused for abuse I suffered in the church. If I do not believe in said deity then there is logically no reason to extend the same politeness to it than that which I would be asked to give a living being, such as the abuser. To me the suggestion feels a lot like the scapegoating that takes place when evoking the image of an imagined devil, the counterpart to an allegedly purely good god. It asks of the non-believer to pardon a god by shifting the blame upon something else, anything else besides the god that is claimed to have control over the entire universe. It is just one of the mental gymnastics exercises offered when trying to cure us of our lack of faith. And it isn’t even the most insulting way we encounter in our communities.
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We also hear frequently that we hate Christians and god himself. This one at times is accompanied by the demonization of our atheism by claiming our views are an attack on the core values of Philippine society. It often comes up when the subject of freedom of religion arises. When we assert that the freedom of religion is often utilized not as a freedom but more so a protectionist stance to defend Christianity’s oversized influence on the rest of society, that questioning of how this freedom is wielded against non-Christians is what far too many Filipinos see as an attack. But we aren’t being antagonistic with this. We do firmly believe that any such freedom of religion in any society must also hold with it a certain freedom from religion as well. If all members of society are to be equally protected under the law then all views on faith and god should be protected. To claim that freedom of religion means the law should safeguard your personal religious beliefs, even when doing so would mean imposing those said beliefs upon others, then you aren’t exercising personal liberty but rather asking that the liberty of others be violated. We see this in our society when religious institutions are permitted to file cases, have people arrested, over what amounts to nothing more than hurt feelings among the faithful. Such examples recently include the repeated arrest of a drag performer, who is religious in their own right, over a song and costume. As well as a woman filing case after case against a rival church over just one scripture verse and piece of religious imagery the two groups couldn’t agree upon. And even more telling is that if my own name was signed to this post, I could legally be arrested for “insulting religious sentiments” if any believer from a state recognized religion felt so inclined to file a case. That reality of how “religious freedom” is wielded under Philippine law is why we strongly believe our communal understanding of freedom of religion should always also include freedom from religion as well. Without equal protections, the non-believer does not live under a democracy but rather a theocracy.
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The right to hold no belief at all in the supernatural, to reject religion entirely, is one we believe also must be upheld in childhood. But in a society where all commonly taught senses of morality are derived only, or even mostly, from the Bible or Quran, the right of the individual to not be coaxed into faith is regularly violated. In Philippine society this is best illustrated by what amounts to state enforced Bible classes in DepEd accredited schools. With only a handful of textbook publishers approved by DepEd, all values classes at present remain Christian/Islamic centric. What moral foundations the state demands students be taught all come from Abrahamic based faiths. And all students are subjected to this regardless of religious or non-religious beliefs they personally might hold. We argue that in doing so the state fails to accomplish the stated goal of encouraging strong moral development in students and instead fully violates the concept of the separation of Church and state as it engages in religious indoctrination. Going back to the freedom from religion concept, the inability to teach moral principles without the use of religious theology is a violation of the students freedom to choose and form their own understandings on morality and faith. It also raises the question of just how “moral” a person can be when if their god is removed from the equation then all that was prohibited, all that was immoral, logically becomes permissible. If no sense of morality is offered free from the threat of damnation then there remains a lesser chance of understanding true commitment to what society deems to be moral in the first place.
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These perceivably small deviations from the norms established under a Christian dominated society accumulate over time to create a feeling of isolation/exclusion from the generally accepted definition of what it means to be Filipino. When one dominant belief system is so strongly associated with your own identity, especially when forced by others, it can lead to resentment of it. And when the demand to accommodate that foreign faith is made daily, it creates a sense of being not just a lesser member but also that of an absolute outsider. This is one of the reasons we have dedicated past posts trying to remind other Filipinos that there is nothing about yourself, your identity, your abilities or lack of abilities (such as speaking Filipino or not), that will ever make you any more or less authentically Filipino. We understand on some levels, through our own experiences, what rejection and exclusion from the majority means. And it will remain a focus of our group to build space for a more inclusive concept of what being Filipino means.
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Ang Sabong
When we refer to the middle class we are often referring to the comfortable class, the complacent class. This is not class envy nor is it derogatory. It is a recognition of how the capitalist system here in the Philippines works. A recognition that those with the means and power to manipulate the system from the top have chosen to poison the bayanihan spirit they claim to cherish when trying to inspire the lower classes to sacrifice that which we do not have the privilege to surrender of our selves and resources. While having pacified the comfortable class through allowing the illusion of progress, they poison the concept of bayanihan by then pitting the middle class against the third class pinoy. Utilizing the pawn as an oppressor of the untouchables through claims of the “lazy” and so-called degenerate poor. Portraying some of the hardest working Filipinos, and poverty is a back breaking burden which demands constant struggle, as the reason for why so few of the comfortable class advance any further. This is the eternal sabong that capitalistic societies need to maintain themselves. A class struggle the system deems necessary but never outright says is occurring.
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The Comfortable Class’s Blinders
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When PNoy and Duterte were in office they offered the middle class different means through which the state could pacify their ranks. Both utilized materialism and the circus to differing degrees. Both made sure the cults they formed felt superior to the unwashed masses that both swept under the rug. But it was Duterte that took the mask off the state and outright embraced the culling of the third class as a political promise he sold his presidency with. He was going to kill and plunder the impoverished third class to the cheers of the comfortable class that worshiped him. It was the first time since Martial Law that the blinders came off and the middle class could gleefully enjoy the sight of the state killing the otherized scapegoats from the lower ranks. And not a damn one felt sorry for the blood they spilled.
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That process of otherizing is the consistent practice of the state that binds every single one of our presidents together. Going all the way back to Aguinaldo, the state has always found Filipinos it could scapegoat and kill with support of those pinoys the state chose to make comfortable in both the privileges extended to them and the egotism of belonging while others did not. From the founding of the Katipunan to the establishment of the modern AFP-PNP complex, the system has required the state identify and segregate Filipinos it deemed to not be Filipino enough. The Aetas have faced the state’s persecution with majority support because they are the true first peoples many of our ancestors displaced. The Igorot has gone back and forth between an object of scorn and an object of fetishized Indigenous identity when and as the majority has seen fit. The communists and socialists have been demonized even when attempting to engage the state and society by the rules and peaceful means dictated to them. The drug user has been portrayed as worthy of death without trial. And the poor have for as long as we have been a country been portrayed as lazy and stupid. Each characterization being a method of isolating a target that our elites and politicians have utilized to their advantage regardless of what harm their actions have done to these groups. And all of that has been possible because through the removing of those groups from the collective Filipino identity, our comfortable class has been permitted to view any harm done to the scapegoat as being justified and safe since it would not be done to them as well. In this light, with the privilege of this comforting blinder, their comfort is that of selective inclusion into what our society considers to be Filipino.
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Even when the comfortable class says things like “the Filipino is poor” they do so with the unspoken caveat that this use of “the Filipino” is the other, not them. Even the upper portion of the third class that pretends to be middle class members utilize this form of otherizing to distance, to gain adjacency, and thus spare themselves the reality that what they are supporting, what violence the state will use towards this group, would not happen to them. During the drug war’s height (as it has not ended) the recreational users among the middle class used this same method to speak of the “adik” while pretending their own use was not equal. And this utility that otherizing offers is why our system encourages it so much. It accomplishes the isolation of a targeted group, the rationalization process among the comfortable class, while also making those using it feel special/included into the ranks of something greater than themselves.
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While there are a multitude of other means with which the complicit supporters of our politicians are made comfortable in the positions they are taught to embrace, the myth of hard work paying off is one both our state and the Church feed Filipinos of all classes.
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Your Success Is Never Just Your Own
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Idol worship is a massive part of our culture. It is not just some random aspect of what it means to be Filipino either. It is a direct result of our state’s political and economic systems that could not function without the constant encouraging of Filipinos to form cults around everything from music, to television and shows, sports, and to politicians themselves. And we don’t even seem bothered by the brazen manners in which it has been normalized for generations upon generations. So much so that anyone we even remotely admire is commonly referred to directly as “my idol”. And while we could spend an entire long post on why this aspect of our society annoys us (no, we don’t dislike that people have things they enjoy), we will stick to how it benefits the state. But before we can get to that we have to look at why it exists.
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We are taught very early in life to admire and idolize people who have been successful in business, the arts, and politics. The biggest reason for why we are told to look up to them is because our country’s religions and society claim that these individuals worked hard to get where they are at. Even when it is blatantly clear that people like Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte never worked an honest day’s work in their lives but were instead privileged offspring of dynastic clans, we are told the same damn lie. Their hard work was rewarded by god or our system because the integrity needed to work that hard is always rewarded in the end. And despite the harsh reality that untold millions of Filipinos have worked themselves to early graves while never climbing out of poverty, the lie persists. It is a lie that Catholicism and Protestant Christianity are largely at fault for promoting and indoctrinating generations of Filipinos with. But it is also a lie that has roots in our colonization by imperialistic powers that needed their exploited subjects to believe so as to maximize the wealth to be exported from our peoples. So even though we can all look at our artists and spot an incredible amount of dynastic traits in the industries in which they work, look at our politicians and see how all of their family trees are rooted in fiefdoms of their creating, we still tend to first look at them through the lens of a lie that was always designed to subjugate us and make possible our exploitation.
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The truth is that no matter how hard we work, no matter what success we have, none of what we accomplish will ever be achieved solely through our efforts alone. Which brings us back to bayanihan and the poisoning of it. Because if we honestly believe that bayanihan is part of what makes the moral fiber of authentic Filipino culture then we also have to realize that the hyper individualistic nature of Americanized capitalism, the system forced upon us but enjoyed by our elites, is absolutely contradictory to the collectivist/mutualistic relationship bayanihan embodies. The reason for poisoning that portion of the bayanihan spirit is because in inspecting that contradiction it encourages us to question what shared reward do we as a society ever get to enjoy in when our idolized elites are successful? When the top 1% of Filipinos own so much of our country’s lands, when 50% of the country self identifies as poor while living in the shadows of tycoons and their extravagant wealth, what has the collective masses, those of us from whom the labor which generates our elites’ wealth is sourced, been permitted to enjoy of the rewards rendered? It isn’t food. We have far too many hungry for that to be true. It isn’t water. We pay more for drinking and household water than most our neighboring countries. It isn’t housing. The majority of Filipino households have no actual housing security and are constantly at risk of homelessness. It isn’t prosperity. All you have to do is compare our living costs to that of developed nations and it becomes clear we pay more while earning considerably less.
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It is in the system’s rejection of shared loads and shared rewards that we find why supposed hard work setting us free is a lie the Philippine system needs for our comfortable classes to survive. Despite the reality that everything built in this country, all wealth accumulated in this country, is the direct product of the masses of working poor, the so-called successes of the upper and middle classes are the only thing that gets celebrated. Well, that and our so-called “resiliency”.
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In Conclusion
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The struggle of the exploited lower classes will never see true liberation so long as the violence of comfort is permitted. What has passed as progressive thinking and action in the past has often been hollow words meant to placate those with means to act but not the will to do so in a meaningful manner. While we believe that education on what forms of inner-class violence takes place, we also believe that very uncomfortable discussions on class need to be taking place. We need to eliminate our prejudices towards the third class Filipino, end the paternalism so often present in how we discuss poverty and struggle among the lower class, while identifying the reasons for why society has for so long utilized the poor as props. As a group writing for this page we make no attempt to hide that we belong to the lower class and therefore we also make no attempt to soften how we speak from our experiences. Part of the voice we offer is that of demanding a place at the table rather than another round in the cockpit.
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Deliver Us From Evil
“We share the same passion for peace. We share the same passion for human beings,” then president Rodrigo Duterte speaking of Netanyahu during his October 2018 visit to Israel. Duterte’s visit came on the heels of his televised rant in which the president had likened himself to Adolf Hitler, claiming the Philippines would recreate the horrors of the Holocaust under his leadership. Duterte’s chief diplomat, Teddy Locsin Jr, had followed that rant by claiming “the Nazis weren’t all wrong” via his Twitter account. Yet Netanyahu wanted to be in bed with Duterte regardless of the Nazi praising strongman’s words. No amount of dead poor brown people in the Philippines was going to stop the Israeli leader from working with Duterte. So, as many speculated, Netanyahu went to work rehabilitating the Hitler fetishist from Davao. And there was a very good reason in Netanyahu’s perverted mind for doing so.
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“But we also share the same passion of not allowing a country to be destroyed by those who [have] corrupt ideologies that promote nothing but to kill and to destroy,” Duterte continued before thanking Netanyahu personally for Israeli aid, weapons and guidance in the AFP’s wanton destruction of the city of Marawi in Mindanao. Duterte and Netanyahu knew that their mutual lack of concern for humanity served each state’s genocidal ambitions. So long as the Philippines had a leader as demented as Duterte, Netanyahu had an ally that would overlook any crimes against humanity that Israel committed. This was a partnership between the most evil men each country had to offer. And it is one that continues to pay out for both parties.
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“I will crush Hamas. I will give them 48 hours to get out of the place. If not, I will flatten it. No more Gaza to fight for,” Rodrigo Duterte said in his television show in late October of 2023. He then encouraged Netanyahu to “pulverize Gaza and make it the world’s largest cemetery.”
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As Israel faces calls for trial over genocide, Rodrigo Duterte has been outspoken in his support for Israel’s crimes in Gaza. He has specifically stated that Netanyahu should be given leeway to attack Palestinians in any manner Israel wishes, regardless of the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions. A stance Duterte has held steady on since his days in office when he then too ranted in support of Netanyahu’s past offensives in Gaza. It is this blind, rabid support for Israeli crimes that Netanyahu sought to foster when he invited Duterte to Israel. Ordering Israeli press and politicians to treat Duterte, and his daughter, as one of their own. By stroking Sara Duterte’s ego via the entertaining of the myth of her family’s “Jewish roots”, Netanyahu found every single button to push with Duterte so as to make him a lifelong lapdog of the hardline Zionists in Israeli politics. In return for Duterte’s work on the Philippine home front, Netanyahu has kept his end of the bargain in stonewalling any international effort to hold the Duterte administration accountable for crimes against humanity committed here at home.
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What Marawi showed the world was an early warning sign of what madmen like Duterte and Netanyahu are capable of when working together. The complete rejection of the rules of war, the clear display of inhumanity in ignoring the civilian toll of total warfare, was on display as Duterte openly promised to raze the city and everyone in it.
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Gaza is not an echo of Marawi. It is the logical conclusion to the math that Israel has worked out over repeated escalations. It was allowed to aid Manila in its ongoing imperialist project to pacify the people of Mindanao through intentional deprivation and the lingering threat of absolute annihilation. Israel has been permitted by the West to unleash the same and more upon the Palestinians for decades. Now it shows clear and undeniable intent to enact a final solution to the Palestinian question posed by occupying Zionists. By utilizing the dreamed outcome Duterte’s words offered, the creation of the world’s largest cemetery, Netanyahu intends to finish Gaza. Where the Philippines utilizes extraction based colonialism in Mindanao, Israel seeks the complete genocide of a people.
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Liberation and the Comfortable
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Both Duterte and Netanyahu are not masterminds of any sort. Their power and positions are not the product of their own genius. Both criminals are products of the society they have learned to exploit. They understand, as do all successful statists, that the systems they operate in require the majority to be made comfortable. In fulfilling this, the preservation of the privileged majority, they are given room in which to pursue their perverse desires. Duterte’s climb to power on a manufactured “populist” wave was only possible by providing an imagined threat to the majority’s comfortable existence. Decades of lowered expectations gave Duterte a population of people who expect little while being encouraged to be content with mere dreams of true progress. So instead of promising the usual carrot of better days ahead, Duterte painted a story of a “drug menace”, the ‘enemies at the gate’. If he could not make the majority any more comfortable, he could make himself into the image of a savior sent to stand between them and an imagined threat to their comfort. Netanyahu’s sordid political life has often followed the same path.
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We talk often about liberation and many of you now supporting the Palestinians talk often of it too. But the Palestinians will not be liberated so long as the support they are offered comes from those who’s comfort in the system prohibits true action on the Palestinian people’s behalf. For all the emojis, all the signs and marches, the path to liberation for any of us, Filipino or Palestinian, won’t be won by the mere arrival of peace. For peace is often nothing more than a temporary comfort for the abused. True liberation will only come to the oppressed across the world when the systems we live under are shaken, the comfortable masses are forced to share in the sacrifices of the downtrodden which have held them up for so long. When the majority are forced to recognize that the privileged lives they have led are paid for not in your own sweat and blood but rather in the lost lives of others, that is when liberation begins. And for many of you who have protested in support of Palestine, those first steps are taking place.
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We are tired of a world run by Dutertes, Marcoses, Netanyahus, Bidens, Trumps and whatever other leaders you wish be named. We are tired of the impunity the West and its puppet states have enjoyed while killing the vulnerable and oppressed peoples of the global south. But none of the anger you have felt will make a difference so long as those with the means, with the promise of freedoms so many others are refused, only ever offer tacit and conditional support.
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What you saw happen to us during the drug war is not something isolated to our islands. What you see happening to the families in Gaza every single day is not something that will remain only their pain. When people who have been made comfortable by their states are not willing to speak as state violence is dealt out to others, the people who lead you take note and understand that nobody will speak on your behalf when they do the same to you. That is what has always been meant when you hear “none of us are free until all of us are free”.
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Every person who cares about the rights of the oppressed should, especially now, be prepared to sacrifice. Whenever and wherever possible, disrupt the artificial peace your state has created by taking direct action by whatever means necessary.
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King and the White Moderate
Dr Martin Luther King Jr is perhaps one of the most intentionally misunderstood and misrepresented figures in modern American history. While actively vilified while alive, persecuted by the state for the purpose of silencing his message to Black Americans, he was given the José Rizal treatment upon being shot in yet another extrajudicial killing in a country where skin color tends to play the determining factor in most such murders, even today. The state took note that portions of what King had preached could be twisted and turned to pacify the movement that men like Malcolm X were capable of leading. By latching onto King’s non-violence, the state found a voice that it had helped silence and decided that if put through a strong enough filter that King’s message could serve the United State’s interests. It had to erase the racial undertones, cover up the anti-imperialism, and pacify the white audience King would be dressed up for. In doing so the state has encourage generations of Americans to believe in the government approved version of the man it wanted to find in King’s words. Dumbing down and sanitizing the message helped create counter narratives such as “I don’t see color” so that generations of useful citizens could be coaxed into becoming the white moderates that King deplored.
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So what in King’s message did the state find so threatening that it rejoiced in the killing of Martin Luther King? One of the largest parts of King’s doctrine for creating change that the United States government hates even today is that of how King defined direct action.
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Writing from prison in Birmingham, King addressed his community by speaking to the increasing hardship Black people faced as the Civil Rights Movement faced off with the backlash of white supremacists across the United States. As Black men and women stood in the path of water cannon blasts, police dogs, and public beatings, King’s message was not to tone down the actions being taken but instead that tensions were to be expected and racial tension was the aim. Bombings, lynchings and burning crosses did not deter King or the rest of the Black community. But King noted that the “allies” among the allegedly progressive white population were not as dedicated to progress as they claimed. Calls for a negotiated peace came from church pulpits in white communities while Black churches burned just down the street. White and Jewish leaders who had offered support to King were now asking for more peaceful forms of non-violent activism that would pacify white people instead of aggravate the racists. Yet in light of his prison term and the growing number of Black people being jailed alongside him, King did not call for an unjust peace like the white moderates asked.
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From King’s letter:
“You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”
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The notion that the rights of any oppressed group can be negotiated into existence was not one that King believed in. For that reason he strongly supported the use of disruptive and direct action that challenged society, forced society to stare deeply into the depths of the oppressed people’s despair and witness the heartless denial of a people’s humanity and dignity by means utilized by the oppressive majority. In doing so, King acknowledged that long felt discomfort of the majority was necessary in establishing their understanding of the injustice the oppressed minority had been living with for untold years prior. He wanted the transfer of pain to occur through the refusal of allowing the majority to ignore any longer the true cost of their enjoyment of the privileges they had reserved for themselves alone. That process, with all the resulting tensions and pain, was key to a true establishing of conditions under which the oppressor could render their position as untenable in any resulting state of existence alongside the oppressed. It was never in King’s message to appease the status quo, to coddle the privileged, and accept mere token gestures under the guise of wishing for a just peace to result from it.
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King:
“Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.””
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King knew very well what enemies his community faced when demanding their rights under a system where a hangman’s knot could easily be found dangling from a tree branch. Yet even with the United States Klan membership growing during the Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t the white hoods that King seems to have felt were the most dangerous to his community. After all, the Klansmen were a known danger that, despite hiding their faces under their hoods, announced their intent very clearly. It was the double speak and cowardice of the white moderate that often undercut the rights movement at every turn. The white man who would in one breath admit that the treatment of the Black people in America was vile and unjust but then in the next breath demand that Black communities “behave more civilized” and “uphold the peace” so that white communities could avoid discomfort. That faux progressive that still lingers in every justice movement to this day which wants credit for not being overtly racist but does not have any true interest in dismantling the structures of white supremacy that enable their community to enjoy privileges so often denied to others.
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King:
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
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When King was shot, and he was shot because the white dominant portion of American society didn’t want to be inconvenienced any more, the state erased his attempts to call out the white moderates who had stood on the sidelines for years. The state erased his attempts to outline the importance of direct action, disruptive action in the pursuit of justice. The state wants people to see King as the ideal version of a “peaceful” Black man. It wants the tension that King sought to create to never be a problem for America’s ruling class again. The further Black leadership and public figures in America get from the idealized version, the sanitized version of King that the state offered, the more the white nationalist state prepares for tension on its own terms. When Black Lives Matter speaks up without the filter used by the state for King, the white moderates return to demand “civility”. When young people today learn about King and Malcolm X without the propaganda that generations before them were fed, the state moves to ban books and criminalize the unapproved truth about Black history. King was shot like so many other Black Americans because his existence and his truth challenged a system built upon the perceived necessity of other’s oppression.
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We here in the Philippines have our own manufactured heroes that both the United States and Manila repackaged and filter fed us. It is in the unlearning of the approved narratives and the studying of what our actual history was that we find the villains we’ve been taught to admire and the heroes we were denied. By deconstructing the propaganda of the state we can more readily identify what justice we have been denied and what freedoms the state fears us enjoying.
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Upon Butterfly Wings
Content Warning: This post contains content dealing with sexual assault, physical violence, verbal abuse and suicide.
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There is a distinct moment in my childhood where the line between housed and unhoused chapters meet. All the days of being the perfect little girl in a religiously devout family sat neatly on one side of that divide while whatever version of me that exists now remains forever removed from her. It is a moment that exists because of the very foundations of our society, our family structures and religious notions, enabled it. Created the space for it. And though I treat it as an isolated moment that I want to keep trapped in its own place on my timeline, it is a moment that taints the two parallel worlds it created.
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I wrote last year about my first attempt to end my life. It was hard to put to words even in passing. But it was a product of what I’m going to write about here. Because what I want to write now is a part of me that no matter how I try to make sense of it, it undeniably reaches out of its isolation to shape my understandings and opinions on everything. All the moments we live, for better or worse, manage to do that to some extent. Perhaps the unpleasant experiences, the traumatic ones, manage to do so even more.
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The other day I wrote that the word that comes to mind when I hear a man speak about what they want from a woman is the word balisong, butterfly knife. It comes to mind because for much of my life I learned from men that what they want isn’t always what I want to give. Our society so often applauds their demands through normalizing their lusts at the expense of women. Meanwhile we are taught to appease those demands with polite tenderness, often again at our own expense. I learned with puberty what those demands were. And since our culture often shields those in positions of authority, I learned that saying no wasn’t always considered polite enough to be acceptable.
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Multiple times a week my mother took me to parish she attended and prayed at. I learned all the words and memorized the statues of Jesus and Mary. I also became aware of how unholy the robes are that priests often hide behind. Every time I was touched I was told that I was dirty, a sinner. Yet he could smell my hair as Jesus hung there deaf and incapable of hearing my prayers. So I learned that everything about me was filthy with every violation done to me by the same hands and lips that delivered the so-called word of god to the flock that included my mother.
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In the months before my 13th birthday I found myself wishing I could cut away my skin and walk out of the dirty body I was trapped in. My bones hurt, my soul ached and the areas I had been told were the dirtiest felt the worse. When I told my parents it went from a silent prison to one of being beaten for sins I didn’t know how to stop. So I decided to take my lolo’s balisong and try to cut myself free. If Jesus wouldn’t listen, if Mary refused to intervene, I would march right up to god himself and tell him to go to the hell he had created for me.
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Two days after I turned 13 I was a street child. My family didn’t want the dirty disgrace of a daughter with them. The Church seemed happy that nobody talked. I became invisible to all the supposedly decent people I had been raised among. My abuser was the pangulo of the Church in our community. His place as a man, one supposedly “or god”, protected him. My father that left me bruised and put me out of the house was the pangulo of the family. His place as man of the house protected him. I was learning early on that men in any position where others could respect them were dangerous men to be around. Years on the street would make it clear that men were just dangerous for me.
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I remember often being told to guard my words and monitor my tone when talking to or about men. My mother and lola both encouraged it in me from as early as I can remember. It is part of what I struggle with today when thinking about how I understand feminism and anarchism alike. While there is much more I will be writing about in relation to men’s privilege in our society, I remember that moment most when thinking about how our communities so often encourage the appeasement of men over the protection from them. We are told to appeal to their ego, leave their macho-interpretation of masculinity in tact, so we can have our fleeting moments of peace. But to the extent we are so often expected to do so means that we also are being asked to sacrifice our safety, our boundaries, just to satisfy them.
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I understand that not all men are abusive or predatory. And my wording, as flawed as it might be, could probably make better distinctions. But I have never had the luxury in all my years to gamble over which man is safe to say no to and which one is not. That is where the expectation of femininity as a passive character in our cultural structures leaves us vulnerable. If the man is allowed space to feed his desires without consistent counterbalances to insure our rights and safety as women, we don’t actually have the space in which to say no when we desire to or when necessary. It also encourages other women to not intervene.
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These posts are going to be personal in nature as we keep going. I am not very certain how much I want to write or all of what I want to say in this series. Actually, I am still debating whether to make these posts. I hope somebody who needs to hear something within these posts finds them.
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☆AP
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No Right To Exist
The greatest lie told about Israel by its defenders is that the state of Israel is special. That its formation was necessary and unique. Yet in all the history of settler colonial states, Israel’s only claim to exceptionalism is that of its brutality towards the people it has displaced, violated in every possible way and now attempts to expel in its own perverse recreation of a final solution. The state of Israel has remained the only country in a post World War Two world order that has been granted permission from the West to commit sustained acts of genocide without repercussions. As Biden has said in past “wars” in Israel’s history of occupation, the West sees no limits to what level of barbarism the Israeli occupation forces can utilize against the dehumanized and otherized Palestinians. Where Obama gave Syria a “red-line” he warned not to cross while Assad savagely murdered his own people, Biden has consistently offered the Israelis support and political cover for their crimes against humanity. Now we watch as Israel sustains its campaign of collective punishment. We witness the heartless behavior of Israeli soldiers rejoicing in the intentional killing and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians. We listen to the cries of families as the rubble becomes tombs for their loved ones. And we see clearly that Israel is using forced famine to try and break the spirit of the long resolute will of the Palestinian people holds firm.
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There can be no peace with the state of Israel any longer. It has planted seeds of future resistance with every soul it extinguished in these last months. It has watered them in the blood of those who remain and provided all the motivation to bring forth their pain in words and actions yet to be seen. Through this remarkable display of inhumanity, Israel has claimed that Palestine and its people no longer have a right to exist. And yet if the rules of the so-called civilized world community are to be adhered to, Israel has also shown that the state of Israel has no right to exist. It has violated every principle of international law that the West, under United States leadership, utilized to void the sovereignty of states like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel has committed acts of genocide we have not seen except in Darfur and during the Soviet forced famine in Ukraine. It has through its relentless bombing shown the world a modern version of Japan’s Rape of Nanjing, Germany’s siege of Leningrad, or the supposed “liberation” of Manila through its razing by American bombs. The intentional application of force when knowing it would be civilians that shouldered the weight of the casualties shows that Israel is a state which cannot be trusted to adhere to the rules of war and humanitarian laws enacted after World War Two. Israel’s sovereignty should be on the table in light of its rejection of Palestinians’ humanity.
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We once again will say that we wish our government here in the Philippines would sever all ties to Israel. Void all diplomatic and civilian visas offered to its citizens. Deport its diplomatic envoy and close its embassy. The history our people have with repeated colonial rule by brutal empires from the West to Japan is one that cannot be considered compatible with that of the modern Israeli state. Our ancestors fought by any means necessary to cut down and destroy the banners of the colonizer as well as the colonizers themselves. It is in the ever resistant voice of the Palestinians, unwilling and incapable of being subjugated, that we hear the echo of our own languages, our own mother tongues, repeated in a demand for the recognition of their existence. So if Israel does force the Gazans into Egypt or Africa, we will remain behind them in any and all action their people take towards the undeniable goal of living freely upon the land that birthed them.
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