16Mar26 – 245am
During a considerable time period of our lives, Rian and I labored in extraordinary and very creative ways to contribute to discreet efforts to stop an organized-crime type of widespread murder of civilians. Instead of availing of offered access and privileges from some well-connected officials and politician-contractors, we opted to remain independent, foregoing millions worth of opportunities and power.
In this country, many, if not most (depending on the national political situation) organized activist groups have their position and stand on issues almost exclusively anchored on their hard-core beliefs and ideologies, including communist causes. The country was beset by violent communist insurgency for many decades, the longest in any democratic country of the world. The mainstream population has gotten used to be rather docile even in the face of an oppressive regime, or a highly controversial policy that’s so unpopular or radically in contrast with the long-standing values (and religiosity) of the people and our (sadly) distorted but impressively resilient kind of democracy, and I partly attributed it to the fact that the face of any kind of activism has been hijacked by what’s perceived as operatives of the communist movement. You go out in the streets to protest, you belong to, what’s perceived, or tagged by government as, the communist elements.
(It’s painful to the brain to be consciously be very careful in how I compose my statements in this article, and in finding alternate words and phrases to what I would instead say were my readers here were only the ones I trust, so I wouldn’t need a lot of discretion otherwise.)
During the early part of the Duterte administration, several big names being identified with the communist movement were invited, expectedly as former President Duterte promised, as members of the Cabinet, and the entire loud and noisy communist movement, always the first to go militant even for simple acts of indecency by a single major public official, became rather like the silent shy type in the face of what they later claimed, after their expulsion from the regime, as genocide and mass murder of the poor.
I was steadfast in my stand to not dilute the causes that we fought for, with those of the special interests of the communist movement and its front groups, the mainly highly-partisan political groups, the accused drug lord-politicians, and the old and traditional power blocs of the elites whose main concerns were their special interests. If we did coalesce, in terms of our specific approaches and efforts then, even if only for the special urgent causes then, we would have had all kinds of support groups both domestically and in the international community.
So we suffered from acts of torture, extreme difficulties, all kinds of harassments and humiliations as we labored to discreetly campaign against the widespread murders, in creative ways. We actually survived 2 murder attempts by powerful people, interestingly, one by a powerful figure being then tagged as narco-politician by operatives of former President Duterte who did not know he was inadvertently a beneficiary of our work.
One elephant in the room was our obvious support of President Trump then in his first term. That cost us respect, credibility, and support from the very kinds of power blocs in the U.S. and even Europe that we thought were most likely to pick up on the very serious issues including accusations of genocide against the government then. I only later realized that, upon learning so much more from these leading social-cause-figures in the Western societies. But I have no regrets on this.
There are instances in life when you have to remain steadfast in your greater causes even when in doing so would cost you everything, even your safety, security, your survival, livelihood and ability to protect your basic freedoms, rights. To remain effective, and to stick to your greater missions in life, you don’t resort to expedient thinking and decision-making. On this regard, I am having a dilemma right now. But because I very strongly believe that God works in mysterious ways, and heed the lamentations of humble but loyal believers, I keep this kind of faith in my heart, that I would be afforded, what’s just and fair especially with the great sacrifices I made in all of my life for the greatest causes of humanity.
I do make mistakes, in judgment and emotional outburts, say, in my righteous indignation of the great evil that I’ve been tolerating and enduring for not a short period of time by now, if for an operational environment conducive to the pursuit of great causes that I so sacrificed a big chunk of my life in this world. But I also have non-negotiables, and bottomlines, and in the face of great evil mightily trying to exercise powers and controls to constrict our space, in the very local society where we are supposed to be local heroes due to extraordinary volunteer work (including finding medicines for sick babies, and fighting off a likely robbery at sea during a typhoon in Western Pacific when I was tasked to buy critical supplies for many people in some islands) in a time of very dangerous grave crisis.
