Juan on Juan on Juan: ?

I spent a wonderful afternoon at Everest Academy talking about how ordinary citizens can provide better alternatives to the measures proposed in House Bill 5043. Most, if not all, of the speakers insisted that developing the proper perspective regarding reproductive health should involve both the parents and their children. In my capacity as resource speaker for both the I AM S.T.R.O.N.G program and I Keep Love Real, I suggested that the interaction between parents and their children should take the form of a continuing conversation as opposed to magisterial lectures dripping with all pomp, verbosity, and the promise of fire and brimstone that indignant and well-meaning parents are wont to deliver in the heat of the moment.

Sadly, the continuing conversation that I had begun in my tv show, Juan on Juan, has to end. Despite the fact that the show had been performing beyond expectations, I chose to stop doing the show precisely because I wanted to spend more time nurturing my growing family. My advocacy, which is really about the choice to love, begins at home. There is no question in my mind that as much as I love having a forum to promote intelligent discussion of my favorite causes, I love my family more. And so, with as little pomp and circumstance as I can muster, I bid a fond farewell to my burgeoning career as a tv personality. Thank you to all the people who came on the show, and to all the people who, despite the horribly inconvenient time slot, faithfully followed the program.

And now, more ordinary than ever, I continue to support life by helping my family grow in love. What a blessing!

Pro-Life. Pro-Love.

February is Pro-Life Month, and my friends in the Pro-Life Movement have been very busy of late. My good friends Sunnyday, with her talented writer/puppeteer Nicole have been making the long trek to congress to show support for our pro-life legislators in the deliberations regarding the RH Bill. Buding Dee, Amelia Anne Alba and the lovely ladies of Latch Philippines also came out to enliven the otherwise heated debates with their quiet strength and bubbly charm. Maybe next time, ladies, you will allow a solitary thorn to invade your quorum of roses?

Another good friend, Derek Ross of True Love Waits, has also been busy putting the finishing touches on Unashamed, a Purity Conference to be held on February 21, 2009, at the Megatent, 30 Meralco Avenue, Ortigas Central Business District, Pasig City. Derek is a staunch supporter of the pro-life movement, and we're all praying that the conference draws many youth and youth leaders into a continuing discussion on purity, character, and love.

For more details regarding what ordinary people like us can do to truly celebrate love this February, get in touch with Pro-Life Philippines, or drop Derek a line at barkadahan@wagmuna.com.

Nerd Heard?

One of the reasons why I enjoy revisiting classical literary works on a regular basis is because of how they sound. There are very few poets in any language, for example, who can approximate Shakespeare's mastery of both verse and tone, or Dante Alighieri's lyricism, invention, and depth (even in translation). Magical realism drives my wife nuts, but I absolutely adore the sustained artistry and layers of meaning that Gabriel Garcia Marquez weaves into his kilometric sentences. Even when I don't quite get what Gabo means, the sheer beauty of how it all sounds when read aloud makes me think that I will be rewarded for my patience.

Here's a wholly unobjective, but fairly enjoyable list of The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. Many thanks to JessicaRulesthe Universe.com for the link!

Barack Mentality, Addressed?

As a writer of some ability, I rarely publish anything in full. I suppose it's because of a certain amount of vanity that I possess (to some extent) that all failed writers use to validate their rants. But this letter by Manoling de Leon at Pinoy Pilgrim deserves to be published in full. Many thanks to my editor, Diana Uichanco, for sharing the letter with me through e-mail.

January 31, 2009

His Excellency Barack Hussein Obama
President
United States of America

Dear Mr. President:

Some six months ago at the Saddleback Forum when the topic of abortion was discussed, your Excellency admitted that the question of when human life begins was beyond your pay grade. It is therefore with fear and trembling that I learned that one of your first acts as the new President was to overturn the executive orders restored by your predecessor barring U.S. government funds from any foreign or domestic agency that promoted or performed abortions.

This single unthinking act wiped away any semblance of the benefit of the doubt I willingly invested in you during the campaign: that you were the true maverick and not the impostor like your opponent. Now I know better: you look like a politician cut from the same wretched cloth.

I expected you to do better. Anyone whose mind is mired in doubt on such a vital issue as to when life begins would first seek to clear up matters. You did not. Instead, you swallowed wholesale the unscientific argument, believed by countless people whose pay grades are much lower than yours, that a fertilized egg of twelve weeks is not human and could be disposed of medically and flushed down the drain. Or worse, as you recently signed too, an embryo could be experimented on, genetically tested, or played around with as a specimen at the mercy of high pay grade professionals in white lab coats.

These are some of the basic reasons why I and other citizens of the developing world quake with fear. It is ironic that such a seemingly enlightened politician – who campaigned on a platform of change we could believe in, who enjoyed the triumph of struggle against all the odds that defined him, and who has been an inspiration to many people – signed into law a policy that would eliminate the same opportunity from shaping the minds and hearts of future generations of young people and leaders.

One other thing. Just the other day, you ranted and raved against the outsized bonuses Wall Street bankers gave themselves for their rotten performance in the past year. Unfortunately, your Excellency has no moral authority to do that, because by allowing abortions to resume and stem cell research to be conducted without regard for their moral dimensions, you have acted like someone whose pay grade has been raised beyond those of the bankers you so vehemently condemned.

True, every nation gets the government it deserves. The United States and its President are woven from the same culture, the same woof and warp that led it to its moment of crisis. Mr. President, the greatest problem you and your nation face is not purely financial, and neither is it just economic nor legal. It’s much deeper than that, and one need not have a high pay grade to realize that your nation’s problem is rooted in moral turpitude. As the axe of investigative vengeance falls on the Madoffs and Fulds who made off with the billions from fooled investors, not only in America, we hope you and your government learn from the lessons of history that mighty empires are not lost overnight by the actions of a corrupt few. Every worldly kingdom – Persia, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, France, Ottoman, Prussia, Spain and England – eventually collapsed because of the moral weakness of its leaders. If you learn from the lessons of history – and we hope your teachers were at the right pay grade so you learned from them – then America will not join this sorry list of losers. We hope, at the least, that you would not hasten the beginning of the end.

Mr. President Obama, not all is lost. It’s not yet too late. We in the Third World chuckle at the kind of democratic politics you have in the West, because there is not much difference between you and us. We too have low pay grade politicians running our affairs, deciding on matters beyond their pay grade, and making the same stupid mistakes signing into law popular policies on issues they don’t understand. Like the poor Americans who voted you into office, we too suffer the follies of our rulers. We bleed when untimely ripped from our mothers’ wombs. We cry when our hard-earned money is taxed and wasted.

And we tremble, because you have condemned us to suffer the evil that threatens to multiply when economists like your advisers, bankers like those you condemn, and politicians like you who are unthinking decide on matters beyond your pay grade. We tremble at such inconsistencies, because in your efforts to find and punish the culprits that led to the crisis we face, you will discover that without the moral fiber your nation is sorely lacking, you would collectively point accusing fingers at the less powerful: the immigrants, unborn babies, and millions of workers in the world who are on the receiving end of the collective monumental stupidities which we hoped you would stop.


Though we tremble in fear, we also tremble with hopeful anticipation of your willingness to learn. You are powerful, not because of your pay grade but because you symbolize change. You can turn the status quo upside down, injecting a sorely needed moral imagination to your dying nation in a world wallowing in the throes of legislated extinction. You campaigned on an optimistic platform of change, responsibility, accountability, a better life and progress for all. Having gone so far and succeeded against all odds, you more than anyone should know that the best things in life have a moral dimension that go beyond pay grades, titles, and mandates.

Dear Mr. President, you talk of our era as the Age of Responsibility. This is a powerful concept with a deep moral dimension. One cannot talk of responsibility without consideration of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. If the Age of Responsibility you speak of would be but a continuation of the shallow, two-dimensional, and hedonistic world your people in the West know so well, then you will fail. However, if the Age of Responsibility you herald were to remind the world’s people of our common humanity, our shared goals of respect and appreciation for each other’s beliefs and differences and the admission that there lie beyond us realities we may not fully comprehend but that we must respect and cherish, then you truly could be the leader of real change in the world.

You can, Mr. President, symbolize the rebirth of humanity and the dawn of a new age. You more than anyone else would know what direction a genuine democracy must take for true human freedom to take root and flourish. You are in the unique position as the ruler of the first democratic superpower the world has ever known to chart the course of world history and bring the present and future generations to a destiny our common ancestors could only dream about.

Follow your heart, enlightened by your mind, and lead us. You know the right thing to do. Every world crisis results from the lack of good and just people ready to give up their lives to do what is right. America wants you to lead us to a New World, not the old one where unborn babies don’t have rights, where colored peoples are discriminated against, and where the poor have no one to care for them. I, and billions of people the world over, trust you to lead us by example through this New Age of Responsibility. Please don’t waste that trust.

A London Telegraph reporter ventured to say that you are an emperor without clothes, that you are all bluster and pomp, and that when America discovers you to be in the same mold as your predecessors Harding and Jackson, there will be a revolution so great that its threat to the world would not be matched by that which made us tremble during the Cold War years. We hope he’s wrong, not only for our sake, but more especially for the sake of Michelle, Sasha, and Malia. They deserve better, and you can make sure they do.
Sincerely yours,

Manoling de Leon
Senior Citizen
Republic of the Philippines