Reposts

Originally posted on
Sunday, 08 May 2005

To my mom

Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for
itself.They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not
to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make
them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with
yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living
arrows are sent forth.

Khalil Gibran
in The Prophet

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This one was originally posted on

Sunday, 26 March 2006

Immigrants

People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people – V (in the movie V for Vendetta)

Yesterday, immigrants, a million strong, marched through central Los Angeles, surrounding the civic center in a show of force against the pending HB 4437 that criminalizes undocumented immigrants and those who employ, help or aid them. It is not surprising that this anti-poor and anti-immigrant piece of legislative proposal is met with fierce opposition, with immigrant people mobilizing in the biggest demonstration in LA’s history. First, this country, built by the sweat and toil of immigrants and slaves, is now being made an exclusive domain of its early settlers, who, once upon a time, were a band of frustrated pilgrims who wished a better life away from their homeland. A class of people they extolled then as pioneers and heroes, they now wish to punish as criminals. They conveniently forget that they themselves were once immigrants. They oh so conveniently forget that they are occupying a land that historically belonged to these people they now try to penalize and remove en masse. They behave, in a truly classic fashion, very much like the pot who calls the kettle black.
It is tragic enough that these undocumented migrants suffer labor exploitation, familial separation and racial discrimination in their desire to have a better life, or in other cases, for acting on their only hope to survive. It is doubly tragic that they now be placed in the same league as the so-called terrorists, utterly despised like social outcasts and hunted down relentlessly like pests in the farmlands.
The monumental proportions by which greed has overtaken the so-called rulers of this supposedly great nation is immeasurable. They not only want the whole world for themselves, they also not want to share with others what they have now. They want to benefit from people yet they do not want to give them rights. They want to take yet they don’t want to give back. Ah, this government, how it does not serve the people yet claim to represent them.

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This piece originally posted

Wednesday, 26 July 2006

VENDETTA

It is not very often that movies, especially the ones regularly churned out by Hollywood, are both entertaining and enlightening . V for Vendetta is one of those and despite its comic book origins, it manages to yes, enlighten.

I myself was not aware of the existence of such breed of comic book hero, my knowledge being limited to the popular cosmic capers and marvel mutants. But there is one called V who, while not possessing super powers, is extraordinary enough to mesmerize mortals.

Well what can I say, it appears that we don’t really have to look up to the heavens or search the realm of magic to find someone who can deliver us from the human race’s eternal helplesness and eventual doom. We only need to get back to our planet, marvel at the mundane and there find that a hero is just one of us, and could be all of us.

More than that, we also do not need to prepare for alien invasion, the vile monsters of magic or mad scientists gone berserk. We only need to watch out for our fellow mortals who sometimes succeed in blinding or coercing us into submission while they pursue their evil agenda or play god, determinedly aiming to destroy the world and the entire human race at the pretext of saving them.

But a friend said he finds the movie corny so he did not see it. How one can honestly judge a film without actually seeing it escapes me. It is not unlike a man descrbing the pain of giving birth or a virgin explaining the joys of copulation. I will assume he based his decision on the preview and the synopsis. And I will bet it is the parallellism to today’s global politics, the indictment of superpowers that turned him off.

Sad but true, to a lot of people movies should entertain and not enlighten. And they cannot be both. People do not want to learn when they watch a movie, they want to escape reality. And to them those things separate a good one from a bad one. And we wonder why this world is heading towards self-destruction.

Well, the dvd is coming out soon and i plan to watch it again, and keep a copy in the company of an excellent selection of movies, books and music.