The REAL threat to progress is being piped right into our homes!

Si Manong Abe Margallo nga naman talaga. By his own admission, he’s been so busy with his own rambling in that verbose pomposity that so characterises the sort of style that appeals to the Old Fart generation to whom much can be credited for running our sad society aground, that the laughable irony of what he says below in a comment to a contemporary of his as usual escapes his limited sensibilities:

I do like the idea of a “unified voice, when those of differing opinions come together to advance social justice.” Do you think that on a rather smaller scale it is something doable here in FV?

I’m obviously rambling at the moment as I’m past my sleeping time again but what comes to mind because of your provocation is this: Instead of demanding platforms from aspiring leaders who are courting our votes, won’t it be a better idea if we start creating the platform ourselves and by coming together with a “unified voice” for our common design, we tell the candidates: sirs, you have our votes if you promise to do what we say in here.

How is that for a start?

To spare you, dear reader, the effort of slogging through the ramblings of an old geezer who is up past his bed time, I might highlight a couple of things that together propels the above comment into the Hall of Fame of Ironic Reflections.

Firstly;

Instead of “demanding platforms”, create a platform “ourselves” that is a “common design” reflecting a unified voice. says the old man.

Dude, the trouble with folk such as yourself who are so sadly limited to one-dimensional thinking is that there is little room for the sort of routine multi-conceptual parallel-processing approach to problem-solving that describes the minds of truly great thought leaders. Indeed, why does demanding a platform and prescribing its content need to be an either/or proposition?

If you recall waaay back in September 2009 gramps, our resident Vulcan Ben Kritz came up with The BK Platform which attempts to put into practice a simple four-step development framework for such platforms at the sort of world-class quality that one hardly sees in primitivist societies such as ours. We used it as a brilliant sample (refer to the top row shaded in green) to guide the lesser minds that constitute the Philippine National “debate” that we so astutely predicted would struggle with such concepts.

Not only that, we were also demanding platforms from politicians since July of that year. In fact Margallo’s cyber-home, FilipinoVoices.com, is so honoured to have cradled the Platform, plez movement at its conception on the 20th of July 2009 which went on to become the paradigm-shifting campaign that forever changed the face of Pinoy-style political “debate” and the way the bona-fide intelligentsia regard Filipino politicians!

So get over yourself, gramps. While it is quite heartening that you now exhibit an iota of enlightenment and see the immense value that a focus on substance (rather than the quaint focus on form that you advocate) yields for the bankrupt “debate” that has imprisoned Pinoy politics for the last half-century, your form today all but highlights the chronic inability of the Old Guard to keep up with everything that stands for progress in the 21st Century. Having said all of that, I’ll be fair and give you some credit po: better seven months late than never!

Second;

Is creating a “unified voice” of “differing opinions” doable?, wonders the Great Elder while striking a reflective pose.

Well now, it depends on what you define to be the unifying catalyst of a collective blog. If your idea of unifying disparate voices is some kind of ill-defined vision of a “just” and “honest” society then prepare to be disappointed. Why? Well ask yourself this: How is such a vision different from the “substance” of the campaign platitudes of the average Pinoy politician? Does this question leave you scratching your head? Fair enough. It is therefore no wonder that talk of “unity” never seems to transcend low-brow partisanism in this sad society of ours.

In contrast, collective blogs that set the Gold Standard for collaboratively delivering The Truth to its readership do it with such elegant lack of effort — with no shared dogma to speak of and no specific partisan affiliation “prescribed” to its pool of writers. An emergent collective message can be discerned but no contriving of said message is evident. That is because it is not hollow-headed partisanism nor romanticed notions of “country” that bring members of such brilliant online communities together. Rather it is a shared approach to thinking that underpins the cohesiveness of their message even as each individual applies his/her personal style and perspective.

* * *

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

One of the things the Great Elder of the Pinoy blogosphere Mr Abe Margallo contributes to the collective wisdom is the lessons others harvest from his minus-one-factored insights.

In this case, it is that there is an urgent need to free our minds from the grip of the re-cycled thinking of ageing demagogues. Tired old memes still pretty much define the rhetoric of political movement and sense of “country” in our severely-challenged society. They continue to incite such romantically “patriotic” fervor, but like the verbal narcotic that they are, they are resulting in the increasingly severe crashes that follow once their effects wear out after the last fiesta election or ocho-ocho rally — and the pain of these crashes and the emptiness of purpose that follow are beginning to find a stable footing in the collective memory. That is evidence of some progress to pin one’s hopes on indeed!

But for this hope to be realised and the enlightenment we aspire for to be achieved, we must expedite the purging of the national consciousness of these obsolete memes and assert our sovereignity over the oligarch-controlled channels that so efficiently — and profitably — channel this horsemanure into our homes.

The first step is to vote with our remote.

Change the channel.
Tune in to The Discovery Channel.
Click on “exit” with your mouse;
And logon to blogs that truly value The Truth.

The above are a few of the many ways we can, so to speak, vote with our remotes. If we are looking for a new “revolution” to define the second decade of the 21st Century and hence, you can find its home in cyberspace here:

GetRealPhilippines.com/PhilippineMedia

The true hadlang sa kaunlaran (roadblocks to progress) are no longer the politicians that we have decided to set ourselves apart from. The real disease that threatens our march to progress is being piped right into our homes over the airwaves and over fibre-optic networks and copper wires. And guess what: for your trouble, you even pay good money to receive these insults on our already meager intellectual faculties.

Do the right thing and take control.

Vote with your remote.

benign0 is the webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.

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