This much I agree with Manuel Buencamino: “Kristel Tejada deserves more than just being turned into a prop or a tool.  Let her rest in peace.  Let her family grieve with some dignity.”  This is where the pornography of grief should end, though – I agree that much – but Teo Marasigan’s rebuttal got me thinking a bit.

Manuel’s right: there could have been another reason for the suicide.  The same is true for so many people who have committed suicide: yes, you cannot pin suicide on just one factor.  To quote a statement often uttered in the wake of this tragedy, “suicide is complex.”  And the complexity of this situation allows commentators like Manuel – and myself, even – the free pass of dissecting this situation.  The same complexity that allows activists to create a battlecry around the circumstances of Kristel’s death.  The same complexity that allows us to all grieve and cry, whether genuinely or in one of those self-serving orgies of preaching to the crowd.  Or even finding dignity in protest.

There’s where I disagree with Manuel, though: if it’s that complex, should society wash its hands of the responsibility that comes with the death of a brilliant student whose dreams were dashed by poverty?  Especially if poverty is society’s problem in the first place?

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The Zapatistas chose to start their war on January 1st, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect. They took over the Plaza de Armas in San Cristóbal de las Casas without frightening the tourists on their Christmas holidays–this was so much the case that Marcos told some tourists who were going to the beach at Cancún that he hoped they would have a good time, and he told some others who planned to go to the archeological site at Palenque that the road was closed and, not without humor, added: “Excuse the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.”

- Elenia Poniatowska, “Subcomandante Marcos and Culture”

In her column on yesterday’s issue of The Philippine Star, Cate de Leon argues that “activism is passé.”  I think her view reflects a lot of popular middle-class sentiments about how the students of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines burned chairs and school equipment on the school quadrangle – and how some students of the University of the Philippines wrote graffiti on the walls of UP Manila – to protest tuition fee increases that allegedly contributed to the suicide of Kristel Tejada.  It’s the popular middle-class (or, using the term loosely, “bourgeois”) point of view that this kind of “hooliganism” and “vandalism” is unnecessary, ineffective, and inefficient.

I agree with Cate this much: “When you have a cause and you’re committed to seeing it through, you make it your responsibility to make sure you are listened to.  If one method doesn’t work, you try something else.”  There are a lot of methods of activism that I personally do not agree with, like pelting eggs at government officials or destroying the gates of school buildings.  But if we continue looking at activism from that point of view, we’re missing the point of activism altogether.

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This is my last night here in Kuningan, Jakarta: the new bustling and cosmopolitan center of the second largest metropolitan area in the world.  This is the urban cocoon of Indonesia’s capital, where foreign tourists and people on business trips are greeted with something familiar.  I spent most of my week-long “mission” of sorts in this area, so I couldn’t say that I have explored Jakarta, or that I know it like the back of my hand.  I’m not here on tour, but on a business trip: whatever exploring I wanted to do, I had to cram in a day.  No Bandung, no Kota, no Java Jazz Festival and Joss Stone, but enough of an authentic experience for me to miss it when I get back to Manila.

A week wouldn’t be enough to experience “authentic Jakarta,” much more so if work – not tourism – is the agenda here.  What Jakarta has offered me in a day, though, is something that I will never forget.

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It was the poet T. Mulya Lubis who once wrote, roughly translated, “Indonesia’s future is two hundred million mouths gaping.”  As the Blue Bird taxi took me from the Soekarno Airport to Kuningan (sort of the Makati/Fort Bonifacio of our friendly neighbors south of the country), it was easy to see that the one marked, obvious difference between the Philippines and Indonesia is that we drive on the left.

I guess this is reason to believe in the wise words of my high school English teacher: there are more things that bring us together than keep us apart.

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When I was a kid, I had the privilege of a private school education, where teachers were paid well enough and the school had enough funds for grade level administrators to think of ways for us kids to appreciate science.  I had the privilege of having science as the core of my education from elementary, right up to high school.  I had my Ladybird textbooks on everything from dinosaurs to how washing machines work, I had my encyclopedias, and I was able to spend countless hours away from the playground poring over astronomy textbooks in the library, or fiddling with microscopes in the science laboratory.  I had Dr. Beakman and Lester on TV. Science was fun.

To quote Richard Feynman, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something;” much of which, I owe to my elementary school science teachers.

But many Filipino schoolchildren don’t have that today, much less an assured education to speak of.  We owe them science; we owe them the way we’re taught and the lessons we learned from our days behind the school desk.

Now, thanks to the Department of Education, those kids won’t have the joy of science at all.  In a report by Asian Scientist, the DepEd has decided to drop Science from the basic curriculum of Grade 1 and 2 students, although the DepEd says that the subject has not been taught in public schools for the past 30 years..  Education Secretary Armin Luistro says that science will instead be integrated into other subjects; as a subject, Science will be taught when the child reaches Grade 3.

It’s fairly easy to be outraged at this matter, but based on the K-12 curriculum guide for science education, science is pretty much integrated into other subjects and subject matters until the third grade, where it becomes a subject on its own.  I’m not so sure how the most elementary ideas of botany and zoology and even human anatomy can be connected to things like say, civics and culture.  While I think that the DepEd is trying their best in improving the state of education given the extremely limited budget offered to them, I think that it’s a grave mistake for them to not offer Science for Grade 1 and 2 students, or at least postpone the subject matter until the third grade.

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What many of us missed in the news last month: in an AFP report from London, two billion tons of food (roughly half of all the food produced in the world) is thrown away every year.  To give some sense of perspective to how much food we’re wasting, two billion tons is the annual increase of carbon dioxide absorbed by the world’s oceans every year.  Globally, we produce a little over two billion tons of iron ore a year.  A big contributor to food waste: ugly food and vegetables.  Maybe the apples aren’t perfectly proportioned enough, or that there are a few blemishes in the cabbage.  Our preoccupation with perfect-looking food contributes to the 725,742 Olympic-sized swimming pools we fill with wasted food every year.

It’s easy – and correct – to pin the blame squarely on commercialism, on consumerist thinking, on the excesses and wastefulness of the modern way of life.  A company like Krispy Kreme, for example, won’t serve or save a misshapen doughnut: they would throw it away (which is probably the same case for other fastfood chains like McDonald’s or KFC or something).  More than that, however, I think that our choices in food also require some rethinking.

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After thinking things through properly and getting real with things (in more ways than one), I am taking back everything I said about Carlos Celdran, about defiance, and boldness.  I think my mistake was in trying to put a little too much effort in blogging about it, aggravating (among other things) a bad sleeping disorder.  Not to mention that I really looked ugly doing that.

Horrendously ugly.  Uglier than the six or so clauses I cram into one sentence.

So really, Carlos Celdran should have done absolutely nothing.

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