A Marcos loyalist shows the back of her membership card.
MARCOS loyalists don’t get any respect these days.
Just ask Josefina Mangilit, the 59-year-old Quezon City coordinator of the Friends of Imelda Romualdez Marcos (FIRM 24K), which she says has 13,000 members across the country.
Everytime she goes out to attend the group’s twice-weekly meetings—Saturdays in Quezon City, Sundays at the Luneta—she dons a bright red vest that displays her affiliations (an outfit the group calls its uniform). Read the rest of this entry »
Artwork by Vonnegut
1) Reduce and stabilize your population
2) Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3) Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4) Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5) Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6) Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.
7) And so on. Or else.
— from a list indicated in page 112 of Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1990s by American writer Kurt Vonnegut
Celebrities and personalities of all shapes, sizes, colors, and configurations will all celebrate Earth Day this year by turning off lights for an hour.
It will be no different from last year.
Starlets and slacktivists will all give themselves a collective blow job after turning off the lights for one hour.
Big fucking deal.
They will supposedly be joined by a cast of crazies from the rest of the world — the demented and the deluded, the self-centered, the self-indulgent, and the self-important (suddenly, a person comes to mind), the greedy rich, the stupid poor, and members of the bumbling, blathering middle-class.
Excuse me for being a sanctimonious little prick but switching off lights for an hour will do absolutely nothing for the earth.
It’s slacktivism, plain and simple, no better than clicking the join button for a group advocating everything (save for hard work and hell-raising) on Facebook.
If anyone can cut substantial emissions by turning off lights for an hour around the world, then I can find the cure for all cancers, AIDS, and the set of six winning numbers on the next lotto draw.
Resources spent on the Earth Hour campaign — the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel consumed by organizers to help put it all together, the electricity spent for printing out posters, including tarps, which are not so biodegradeable — will more than likely just offset, if at all, the emissions saved by the forced one-hour brownout.
The best solution for reducing effects of climate change is always the hardest.
It includes, among others, cutting consumption of — yes, you’ve guessed it — everything.
Of course, it won’t be simple.
It involves refraining from buying your nth pair of shoes or getting that new SUV just to keep up with the neighbors. (For that matter, it involves drastically cutting use of private vehicles.)
It involves buying locally-made goods because imported ones — while cheaper — consume a lot more emissions because more energy was spent transporting these items to our shores.
Until all of us come to terms with what it really takes to save this planet, Earth Hour at least to me is nothing more than a yearly gimmick; an invented social event just to make everyone feel good.
So will I turn off the lights for Earth Hour this year?
Like hell I will.
I’m going to leave it on the whole night.
And if somebody asks why, I’ll say I’m doing it for the people of Mindanao who to this day suffer from 11-hour blackouts — everyday.
At least, I’ve called attention to their plight.
But that, of course, is another matter altogether.
