The intellectual germ precipitated by Cafeeine_Sparks, one of prolific bloggers of FV and which caught blackhama, an even more prolific blogger with the methodological mind is bound to spread and its social contagion does not stop in UP Diliman. In the same vein, Antipolo City is a little microcosm of Philippine society – writ large. It is so because, contrary to the more fanatical claim, Antipolo is not for Antipolenos just as its Cathedral is not just for its resident parishioners but for all the people of the world – just like any other basilica. Isn’t it called, however sans clear historical basis, as the Pilgrimage Capital?
In temporal-spatial terms, what then is one’s future in Antipolo City against the backdrop of a realpolitik where developments as we on the ground proceed linear, where developments are drawn on tarpaulins and yet the bricks are laid one at a time over a period of so long, over a space so crowded, over a population that overcome each other?
Those who know its history, Antipolo is supposed-to-be where the boom was when the mass search and frenzy for housing has to be a place near every city in the heart of Metro Manila. Unfortunately, the boom yielded more squatters than those who bought titles for their homes. And since the waves of migration never before seen in history, population took its natural course and perhaps, squatter-to-non-squatter ratio could be pegged at 50-50. Wonder then that Antipolo City becomes the place of asylum of criminals and other fugitives of law?
In few more years than later, anything you see in Quiapo maybe the same scene and scheme in Antipolo City. It soon will become like Cubao, Baclaran, Divisoria unless some works in urban planning are now in the drawing board. As many as there had been attempts to develop the city according to some fabulous master plans, the number of failures had been equal to the promise. The vision remains a vision, the promise still the promise repeated million times over. By and large, nothing can change the world in so far as Antipolo is concerned. How does an ordinary Antipoleno then have to view his own future, if any?
Is there a future for anyone here – 2 to 4 years hence? Where would one build such a future? In short, the oft-elusive future one seeks, if one has not yet achieved it, is one along an ideal temporal-spatial configuration. And what would that be in a city where tricycles fill all roads and run around like city’s roving rats? Adding more to the pandemonium is a kind of problem we may call a disconcerting – human traffic – as people bump if jell with each other in roads intended for private vehicles and in sidewalks occupied by vendors than by walkers-by. Everybody appears to be selling everything and this whole orgy of buy and sell is found just about every corner of a little world called the City Proper.
The usual social pyramid is here with the ruling elites with family names you can count by your fingers. People here must have come from everywhere and settling here since 1986 to this day did not indicate much improvement in the developmental landscape. The road networks still leave much to be desired. The circumferential road which is supposed to be a multi-lane highway is convenient parking space for all sorts of vehicles – jeepneys, taxis, tricycles, private cars, commercial vans and trucks and well, yes, garbage drums that stink for up to 4 days before they are hauled in the garbage trucks. Houseowners do not have garage or parking spaces allotted from their titled or squatted on open lots.
The zigzag road that extends from the corner of Circumferential Road and Sumulong Highway down to Masinag Rotonda, corner of Marcos Highway and Sumulong Highway is mute witness to x number of fatal vehicular accidents that perhaps some transport experts and engineers must study the whole span from atop a small plane or a chopper to be able to see what could have been some engineering blunder similar to that of Baguio City. The roads or highways are as always, badly maintained as though maintenance costs have been prohibitive.
And yet come to think of it, the City experienced unprecedented leap in its business revenue tax collection never before recorded in its long history of inexpertise. But such may have been shortlived given the fact that the former mayor met an untimely death in the middle of all that he has envisioned for the city. And everything is changed whenever a new occupant takes the reigns of governance but this has always been too costly since before things can even settle, election is just around the corner. Development is necessarily compromised by the needs of the moment such as the need to strengthen all pockets of support to insure perpetuity in office. In short, it reverts back to patronage politics.
In the end, whatever future is there left all depends on each of us – for isn’t it said that “life is what you make it”? Ergo, we live each day of our lives trying to achieve choices we have drawn for ourselves given certain temporal and spatial considerations. We simply live for ourselves and if this truism be true – collectively, we would have lived for nobody.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Your writing does point to a crisis. writ large.
Freely available on the internet, this one:
http://www.bartleby.com/141/
are think you are the most prolific blogger here :)
nielsky, primer, karlpopper. why hide in so many pen names?
jcc,
You had 2 of your own, right?
Earlier, I have explained my side on this.
Okay, I’l probably have to drop nielsky. Besides, had anything been hidden, no one pen name (we call username that can be changed if one wishes to) would have been known. Thank you.
i don’t have any pen name. jcc is the acronym of jose c. camano. not a pen name at all. i raised this as a simple identity issue to avoid confusion. as primer, i have already associated that handle to a particular viewpoint and style of writing. i don’t want to strain myself figuring out who KP and Nielsky are , when all I have to do is to associate that viewpoint to Primer. but if you keep writing using the three handles, you could be all over the place of FV without somebody else knowing that nielsky, primer and KP are one and the same.
gabby,
Of course, not one here can say he is a prolific writer except one benigno, if I may say. Just no one, reason we do not have an editor-in-chief, am I correct?
Let Mike H be our metrician for good writing. And where’s the bench?
sorry, nielsky, not me. A Diliman law or Journalism major will have to tackle the metrician-work for
nielsky : You may find comfort in knowing that you are not alone. Abe Margallo does the same (create blogposts replete with sentences that contain 45 words of more). Hemingway does, too (though Hemingway did not write for the internet).
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But here is a “bench”:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch_Reading_Ease
9.1 :sad: is the Flesch-score for the sentence above (that starts with “in temporal-spatial terms, what…” and ends with “overcome each other?”)
96.1 :grin: is the Flesch-score for this :
The Flesch Reading Ease Scale measures readability as follows:
100: Very easy to read. Average sentence length is 12 words or fewer. No words of more than two syllables.
65: Plain English. Average sentence length is 15 to 20 words. Average word has two syllables.
30: Pretty difficult to read. Sentences will have mostly 25 words. Two syllables usually.
0: Extremely difficult to read. Average sentence length is 37 words. Average word has more than two syllables.
Journalism major? You’re kidding. Law? It’s anybody’s opinion.
Sorry, there is a lacking word somewhere – “… developments as we see on the ground …”
My apologies, Nielsky was Primer’s login and username.. we have changed it to reflect his original preferred display name..
Nick,
Thanks for the intervention which I had difficulty to explain.
Mike,
I have long done away with my baby English. Please forgive me.
If my blog reads like Harvard Law Review, so be it. Am I supposed to change writing style just to suit one who whines?
You are free to use whatever scale, formula, or model you have learned. By all means subscribe and adopt to Strunk or Flesch which nothing more than only measures sentence or word length.
What makes a sentence either simple or complex are not the number of words that it contains but on the mental images that the reader forms in his mind from these words.
Well, Mike, I wish I had more time. In fact, I thought you would have had more problem with our high falluting counterpart.
I look forward reading your critique on the work of DJB and benigno. Abe might just resent the comparison you gave and it is not for you to say.
jcc,
I then stand corrected if jcc were a simple acronym.
Okay, from hereon, let Primer be my name at FV and let it not be said that the two other ‘names’ are ‘hiding places’.
Lastly, there is a bit of a problem there actually. I thought that regardless if we know who comments on what, we simply have to get hold of the message and test it for its logic, historicism, value, whatever.
Have a nice day jcc!
primer,
i read articles here at FV on the basis of value and merit. i often associate value and merit to writers like benign0, DJB, CVJ, Bencard, Abe, Ding Gagelonia, JEG, Caffeine Sparks, Blackashama sometimes Cat and Leytenian, Juwan, Bert and other personalities.
So if see articles or comments from these people I have myself absorbed on what they say. I may not agree with some of them but I nevertheless appreciate their point of view as honest and unadulterated.
If we keep using different pen names, I get derailed on reading someone which from the very start I should have simply ignored because I have already been forewarened of their lack of depth or to quote DJB of their “half-baked” dissertations.
jcc,
I would have wanted to say the same of similar known works, that does not exempt yours, matter-of-factly.
But I don’t mind whose work I should be absorbed with – I read even those whose works I know from the first word of the blog.
I take patience in reading than ignoring even those by their names alone, their works already have shaped bias.
That is why, to my mind, comments can just be posted here – with or without the name of the authors.
We don’t read because it is the opinion of DJB, do we? That does not make any sense to me.
Nor do I read jcc because he is jcc but because I want to be amused. As leytenian was saying, it cures one’s boredom.
Anybody’s absorption capacity ought to be their own problem, we cannot read or understand for them. That of course sounds more like Mike H.
Honestly, what’s in a name? What make a fuss out of nothing?
The best think tank are a league of experts who do not know each other because if they do, they become less of what they should be worth.
Of course, we don’t normally junk DJB’s point of view and he may even expect not to be junked. Of course, one can just as quickly junk bencard whose line of thinking is a train on a railroad.
You? I’l just read along.
primer,
i have some issues with time constraint. will read only those from my personal view, worth reading. i read FV for 5 months now and for such short period time it gave me some insights whom to read. quite frankly, i know a gem when i found one, and hardly this stone rarely comes from one’s putrified mind.
Every idea, philosophy, or belief is always theory-laden.
Subjectivity, however vicious, belongs to the class. But one can always draw the line between what is subjective from what is objective. There is simply an objective world out there – regardless of our own subjectivities.