On Beauty and Gayness

an essay by Roger B Rueda

Is it proper to say so – that a handsome man can’t become a gay because only the ugly ones deserve to become one? But is it also proper to say that an ugly man can’t be a gay because only those who can look pretty deserve to become one? Our opinions and sentiments sometimes suck – and are puzzling.

Being gay isn’t based on one’s ugliness or handsomeness. For one, being gay is a way of thinking and what makes one tick. So saying that an ugly man is so unrealistic for becoming a gay is so illogical and unthinking. Much so when one is so handsome, because a lot would say that one is living in vain. Being ugly and being gay could effectively interweave. Why not? Being handsome and being gay, too. Being a gay has no system and design based on beauty or race or status in life. Anyone can be a gay regardless of his eminence and prominence –or even looks, so it’s atypical. Life is indeed hit or miss and predictable as well.

Whatever combination one has is thinkable and likely – an ugly gay or a handsome gay or a pretty gay or a freakish gay or a senseless gay or a plump gay. We can’t saddle someone with our own standard. Only a scientist can, to a robot or to his Frankenstein. People especially gays evolve and emerge with a lot of freedom in deciding how to behave and think, because everyone is at liberty. In a country such as the Philippines, all people are expected to be willing to listen to and consider other people's ideas and suggestions. Apparently, the most powerful people in the world are the people who love changes and new ideas. Their maturity and humanity are unforeseen yet felt.

Being gay is indefinable. Being gay has no restriction, yet being gay isn’t really extraordinary because being gay is no different from being a human being. A gay, like a man and a woman, knows love, too. He knows how to value and respect life. He also celebrates life as he is pleased and excited about his reality. He can be impaired by pain and suffering. He has feelings and thoughts because being a gay is a fact of life, something that relates to humanity and existence, something that cannot be discounted or repudiated or circumvented. It is a mystery of life which is appalling based on what is normal and anticipated, yet when not confronted or explored or plumbed up to its depth, we can’t know how enigmatic it is or how reflective it is. It is a fact of life which draws us to be free-thinking and permissive, because we value respect, consideration for others, and love for others based on their happiness and feelings more than the normalcy and what is usual. Being gay is not a choice, but it is being truthful or true to oneself. It is being sincere to one’s innermost complexity. It is recognising nature or the supernatural for what is felt or sensed rather than what is imposed by others. It is confronting oneself instead of disagreeing with it.

Being tolerant to gayness is being OK with more choice and diversity into the society. It is enjoying the uniqueness of everyone and the uniqueness of one’s experience.

Now I hope you’ve got my point and most likely use your imagination to weigh up a lot of things around us by understanding them or putting up with them or passing over them because so long as it doesn’t cause detriment to us, I think the best thing to do is keep mum. For one, we don’t know their hardship and struggle and desolation and misery because they, too, want to live life happily and normally as everyone does.

Life is so fabulous only if we know how to make one.

Napoles

an essay by Roger B Rueda

Napoles is a perplexity herself. Imagine she was economical with the truth behind all the scams she had devised herself and by her surreptitious mentors. At first, she wanted to look in the clear, well-intentioned and straightforward, while appearing on TV, comely and poised. Of course, it is her right to do so. After all, she is a private citizen. But later she came forth to bear out what she knows, perverting representatives and senators and even the Catholic Church. Now she is a lying detriment.

Having professed her innocence before the senate, Napoles with her new testimony now bamboozles the Filipino. Her credibility is lost, her face pinched and drawn as she goes deathly pale. Everyone thinks of her as a liar and a cheat. Well, she only has herself to blame. Had she told the truth before the Senate, then she could have blown up a blast in the government. She could have dishonoured the honourable criminals.

Then the Napolist began to filter through to the DOJ and some others. The confusion got underway. Why was it Napoles wasn’t quick and confident about incriminating her accomplices? Has she passed over some for reason that she and her family could be bumped off anytime or at some point?

Now the Napolist is sanitised. It has become beyond belief: why are some senators drawn in and some left out in the cold, based on whistle-blowers’ list? For what? Anyway, I hope Napoles has substantiations for all the people she has embroiled in controversy and dishonour.  Otherwise, all of this is all her way to mess up the truth to flummox the Filipino. If no one will be indicted, then indeed the Napoles thing is just a show set up to harass and embarrass the opposition and undesirable allies. And thus, she and her family and the whistle-blowers deserve to be sent down.

But I hope, too, that the Napoles thing is not a planned controversy for 2016, to disconcert the plans of some to run for president, or for vengeance for whatsoever – political or personal.

The PDAF scam expose is a bitter taste of truth that the impoverishment of millions of Filipinos is due to the greed and materialism of some representatives and senators. They have no respect for trustworthiness and decency when they secretly appropriated the money intended for the Filipino. That’s why a lot of representative and senators put themselves up for the posts because of the contentious PDAF, which is like a windfall, a gold mine – a secret trove that conceitedly bares their spurious bigheartedness and altruism before the illiterate and the unwitting.

I hope that all the evidence of the Napolist will be brought together soon so that the 2016 and beyond will be the years for squeaky-clean representatives and senators. And all the guilty politicians should be condemned and mortified by displaying their photographs and videos of them at malls and at museums and at schools, with captions or descriptions reminding everyone how immoral, unethical, dishonest, crooked, shady, and fraudulent these politicians are. A book titled ‘Napolist’ is also worthwhile, for children to bury themselves in for them to learn something vicariously – and perhaps with crisp resentment and aversion in their realisation. Only then we can say that we are all serious about our advocacy against corruption.

Inside the Philippines

an essay by Roger B Rueda

In the Philippines, honesty and integrity are only part of propaganda, but the truth is the ones telling of honesty and integrity are those who are lacking in them. The ones who hate the corrupt are those who have consummate corruption. The ones who disdain evils have archevils clad in angelic outfits close to them, manoeuvring them, waiting for their collapse – or they are evils themselves, unknowing that they are. The ones who help the poor are the ones whose family and kinfolk made millions to be poor or took selfish or unfair advantage of the poor to be poorer or down-and-out. Everyone now has their own inner conflict to keep cover, to survive socially, commercially, and politically. Everyone now especially the politicians has become more psychologically precocious and image-conscious behind all their malevolence and voracity. It’s time everyone became more prudent, or else they would be played away.

The national government is pushing for a corrupt-free government, yet the local ones have fraudulence and characteristic of their own. They are the paradox of what is campaigned for. They have agendas of their own. This happens because such a campaign is only made known in words and not operationally and seriously, without all the monitoring and setting up of feedback mechanisms that will provide useful information for future decisions and development of the government. Without this, all the campaigns on anti-corruption are only artificiality. It means it has no sincerity or spontaneity in here. They are all apparently vague and general, only high-flown rhetoric, only hoopla. Acting against corrupt officials only happens when the corrupt government officials are anti-national government, when they are put on the agenda.

Fortunately, anyway, no one is complaining to this point, but history will or after 2016, when everyone has realised the untruthfulness, pretence, and worst treachery of the previous government, whose agendas would have been unimaginable and whose paradoxes would have been two-faced and impertinent.

Another thing, not all local counterparts of the government are good and truthful. Most of them were evils arrayed in pretentious outfits of an angel, their hearts so malicious and avaricious. These local government officials protect anyone who has money despite his/her shameful, unwise, or regrettable act or activity that involves breaking the law. Money in the local level of government talks much and mightily and everyone listens to it, according to a local writer on my Facebook. Surprisingly, the national government is unspeaking about all these. This is a simple failure of sincerity and urgency, to stop all corruption in the government. Well, it is easy to believe this rhetoric when everything is OK, but when a lot in this country are hurtled down to injustice, mishandling, and disproportion – and unthinkable reality, such pomposity becomes exposed and discerned, like what is coming about now, slowly, increasingly – and the tall tale is coming into view like the tip of the iceberg.

The laws of the Philippines are also pretentious and hollow. It is perhaps for this country to be seen in a positive light globally. Imagine millions of workers receive pays below the minimum and whose benefits are deprived of them, yet the government turns its back on this issue and talks like everything is OK in this country before the international media and journalists and foreign legates. What is more substantial and central here – the law, the country’s image globally, the skint workers, who have no voice to express their unhappiness, or the well-fixed employers who grease the palms of the local politicians? Why does the government allow this abuse and violation to happen, reflecting its disrespect for the laws? If the laws are not followed, then why not repeal them – or at least amend them?

This government talks about its achievements, yet in truth, millions of Filipinos are putting up with inequality and injustice in all sectors of the government – as corruption is done in subtlety and with utter expertise, as a lot of poor people are exploited yet disregarded by the DOLE itself. Without addressing this problem, it points towards how unconcerned and lethargic the government is. It reflects how habitually careless or irresponsible the DOLE is. It reflects, too, how defenceless it is from moneyed employers and businessmen, which calls for the government to streamline its policies and ways to be more of help. Imagine this: the DOLE allows the erring employers to manage the distribution of back pays to their workers without its presence. Yes, workers can complain anytime, the DOLE would put in plain words – and the workers sign here. Really? Why can’t the DOLE act on this issue so that distrust and suspicion are avoided? Or does the DOLE itself want to get out of this to help employers do the chicanery lawfully deceptively? Isn’t it so obvious? Only the stupid can’t notice this. What has a representative/senator done about it? Is it OK, anyway? For me, it’s a favour to give latitude for the employers to defraud workers with authorisation. And I’m sure this is one of those good turns extended on the sly by the government to the most moneyed and influential.

I can say then that the laws of the Philippines are not for the welfare of everyone, but for the image the government has outside this country. To say at least that there is no injustice or abuse here because everything undergoes a process. Yet to the mind of the victims, they have become more helpless and adversely ill-treated – not only by their untruthful employers but by the inattentive and dissembling government. Some of them will just keep it in their heart, but to some, they will scatter it, like the scattering of seeds over the fields, over their family and friends, over the next generation. A lot of people know it and all government officials should inspire shame in themselves, because it is not that the people do not know it, they only keep mum to the level nobody knows – until, of course, the flare-up, like those made by militant and radical groups, until everyone is ready and resolute to pressure the government or worst to vanquish the oligarchy, the system favourable to the elite or toffs.

It is funny though that still a lot of our politicians and government officials pretending to be angelic hope to be recognised as an angel and a hero in the end despite the blatancy of their ill will and duplicity. Is it because they think all Filipinos are so thick or dispassionate? Well let’s see in 2016 who the PCOS is programmed to vote for. Let’s see if PR and PCOS are still the best towards a corrupt-free Philippines! And let’s see if PR can still romanticise the incompetence and failure and unfulfilled promises of the present government and the uncontrollability and leaning-on of the local government as all these go down in everyone’s consciousness and in history.