Reconstruction

I spent the first three hours of 2012 retrieving my columns from the archives of the Manila Standard Today and posting them here one at a time. It's a tedious job, but this is the price I have to pay for not being diligent enough throughout 2010 and 2011. :).
In the interest of keeping this blog organized, I have decided to antedate the posts in this blog that contain my columns. It would be unwieldy if I post at least two years' worth of columns in just a couple of posts.

Was it just me of did anyone else notice that fewer people seemed to have bought firecrackers this year. In my neighborhood, the "explosions" were over by 1:00 am. The kids and I were in Mall of Asia until about 9:30PM and our trip back home was relatively uneventful in the sense that there was hardly any firecrackers exploding on the roads. Some pundits say this was because the scare tactics of the DOH worked this time around. Huh? What scare tactics? I didn't see any television ad discouraging people from lighting up firecrackers. And since when did scare tactics work anyway? I think people simply got wiser this time around. And the economic crunch was another factor, too.

Anyway. Happy New Year!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Letter To Our Leaders

Dear Tita Cory, Senators, Congressmen, Businessmen, Media people, Leftists, and all Bleeding Hearts Out There: I am angry. And I know that there are many out there who are angrier than I am for the same reason. And that reason is simple. I am sick and tired of all you guys claiming to speak for me and many Filipinos. I feel like screaming every time you mouth words about fighting for my freedom and my rights, when you obviously are just thinking about yours. You tell me that the essence of democracy is providing every citizen the right to speak his or her mind and make his or her own informed judgments, but you yourselves do not respect my silence and the choices I and many others have made. In other words, your concept of democracy is limited to having your rights and your freedoms respected, at the expense of ours. I am utterly flabbergasted that you still do not get it: we already responded to your calls, and our response has been very clear - we chose not to heed your calls to go t...
Read more

Farewell, Victor

Image
This is my column today. Renato Victor Ebarle Jr. was at the prime of his life; barely 27 years old and just starting to build his career in human resource management. At the time of his death, he was recruitment manager of the Hotel Peninsula Manila. To say that he still had the whole world ahead of him sounds like a cliché but those among us who actually knew him, those among us who were aware of the kind of passion he had for life and for his work, people like me who had the privilege of having been consulted by him on many professional matters, know this with a certain degree of certainty. I was Victor’s professor in three major subjects when he was in college. In each one of them, he sat at the first row, which said a lot about the kind of person he was. Professors know this for a fact: Bullies don’t sit in front of the class where they cannot annoy anyone. I was his thesis adviser and he and his team spent a whole academic school year trying to break new grounds on the question o...
Read more

How That Letter Came To Be...

I had some time in my hands last night. I bloghopped. For the very first time I got to read in detail what people are saying about that letter and about me in other blogs. I have already responded to most of the comments in this blog. However, I cannot possibly answer all comments given that I have only ten fingers and there are only 24 hours in a day. It is very tempting, but this blog is not my life and contrary to the overactive imagination of some people, I do not have the resources to do that. I cannot possibly monitor the thousands of blogs out there. Besides, the comments in this and other blogs (and even in the newspapers) do tend to answer each other, and I do not fancy myself as an ultimate arbiter or judge with the final and definitive opinion (I do not think anyone is qualified to do that unless that person died on a cross and resurrected in three days), so there is really not much to say after reading the various pros and cons. Some people do a better job at it anyway. I d...
Read more