Friday, January 28, 2011

FROM THE BARREL OF MY PEN
By Gonzalo “Jun” Policarpio


“GOD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS”




Philippine President Noynoy Aquino and US President Barack Obama seem to be both placed into a political test tube for national leadership of their respective countries at the opening of this year 2011. The test is how to pilot their ships of state safely amidst a raging storm of crises after crises.

Just recently the shooting of twenty people in Arizona that killed a Federal Judge and five other innocent civilians and seriously injured an incumbent Democratic Congresswoman from that state shocked the White House. In an interview before the media, President Obama sounded like Rodney King, the big black guy beaten with clubs by Los Angeles policemen during a traffic incident, begging, “why can’t we not get along.”

On top of the mounting deficit in the American budget and the huge foreign debt caused by the financial collapse of leading American institutions, Obama’s expensive health care reform law is poised to be repealed by the incoming Republican Congress. He failed to solve the unemployment crisis as he promised to do during the campaign and opted to “kowtow” in the political sense as well as in the literal sense before foreign leaders like Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Chinese leader Hu, Jintao, and Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his sidekick, Russian President Medvedev. Majority of Americans who voted for him now feel that Obama is just all talk, and no walk.

On the Philippine front, the son of the late former President Aquino, who also came to power in the aftermath of her mother’s death and burial, is being besieged by a crisis of violence, deaths, massacres, acquittal of convicted rapists and murderers, release of accused plunderers of the Filipino people’s money, and signs of possible terrorist acts with using incendiary explosive device( I.E.D.) which is a standard tool of terrorists and suicide bombers in Iraq.

At the height of all these serious threats to peace and order, the Philippine media chose to focus on the bachelor president driving his luxury car perhaps to pick up another new date. Majority of the Filipinos who elected him now feel that he is more of a talker than a doer. Or perhaps he just moves too slowly to respond to crises as perceived by many as a sign of weak leadership. Even the reputable Washington-based American thinktank, Heritage Foundation, recently gave him a poor rating in leadership.

So what can we say now about these two political phenomena, Barack Obama and Noynoy, to whom their nations fully rest their hopes for a better future via a cry for change. Let me say this “God works in mysterious ways.”

Friday, January 21, 2011

FROM THE BARREL OF MY PEN
By Gonzalo “Jun” Policarpio


THE MARRIAGE OF POWER AND CORRUPTION



I think almost every Filipino believes that Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino won the presidency last year mainly because of his message in his campaign slogan “Kung walang korap, walang mahirap.” (English translation: If there are no corrupt officials, there will be no poor people.) Sounds convincing but only to the naïve.
Revising the slogan this way is more credible: “Kung walang mahirap, walang korap.”(English translation: If there are no poor people, there will be no corrupt officials.”)

Majority of the poor Filipinos voted for Aquino because they felt that he is the agent of change that would improve their living conditions with Aquino’s anti-corruption agenda.
Here is the truth of the matter: no political power nor any kind of power as long as it is in the hands of a human being can eradicate corruption because power and corruption exist symbiotically: power corrupts.

Let’s accept the fact that in the Philippines, we will enjoy five more years of corrupt government and in the United States, only two more years. What happens in the succeeding government would be much of the same kind of corruption. A meritorious government can only exist in Heaven above where the Angels enforce the law of God.

What am I trying to say, you may ask? I am saying is that we live in a corruptible world and the only way out of it is to fight corruption when we see it. It surely is a long struggle that is worth fighting for.

Imagine yourself swimming in a river full of crocodiles. Surely you’ll be eaten alive unless you fight them off and survive. You cannot kill them all those devilish reptiles.
Yet you can survive with the help of God if you ask Him for help.

So that’s the only thing we can do to survive: ask God for help while still living in this corruptible world.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

FROM THE BARREL OF MY PEN
By Gonzalo “Jun” Policarpio

TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOTS UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY



The idea of denying American citizenship to children born in the United States by undocumented mothers seems to come straight from a person without a heart and soul. Such a person therefore is truly not a person but a robot or a dummy.

The Fourteenth Amendment of the American Constitution provides that “ All persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the state where they reside.” So these dummies want to repeal this amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v.Doe rules that the “Fourteenth Amendment extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the jurisdiction of the laws of a state, and reaches into every corner of a State’s territory. That the person’s initial entry into a State, or into the United States, was unlawful, and that for that reason he may be expelled, cannot negate the fact of his presence within the State’s territorial perimeter.”
So again these dummies want to repeal this highest court’s decision.

Back to my first query, why do these people, if they are not truly dummies, think of adding insult to injury towards illegal aliens. If you do a quick research as to the background of these people or their forefathers, they all entered the New World without a visa. They even tried to exterminate the American aborigines, the American Indians.

Again American history will tell us that the Fourteenth Amendment originally excluded the American Indians from becoming U.S. citizens, except for the passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 that granted them American citizenship.

I am surprised why some Americans who just became naturalized citizens would want to deprive U.S. citizenship to American born children of undocumented mothers. I am much too surprised and upset with some Filipino Americans who toe this xenophobic orientation. Do a random check of these “WhiteWannabe Pinoys” and you may find most of them entered the United States fraudulently.

United States is the “land of the free, and the home of the brave.” We, American citizens and aliens, sing it during every Independence Day celebration. Look at the Statue of Liberty and read the poetic words inscribed on its pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!“

Only true American patriots can understand the meaning of Liberty.