Achieving Happiness

All the newspapers today are swamped with stories and pictures of GMA and her ailing husband the First Gentleman Mike Arroyo who very recently underwent critical open-heart surgery.
I don’t know what it makes me, but hell, I couldn’t care less what the heck happens to Mike A. It also makes me ill to read all the statements being issued by members of the Genuine Opposition expressing comfort to GMA and saying that there’s a ceasefire between the administration and the opposition BECAUSE THE FG JUST WENT UNDER THE KNIFE. Are they for real? Are they sincere? Because if they’re not, they should’ve just kept their mouths shut. Sino bang naniniwala that there’s any love lost between Mike A and, um, Alan Peter Cayetano (whom I’m going to vote for).
Ok, ok, Mike Arroyo has kids and grandkids, and he loves his brother. Pero utang na loob, it’s not like he’s a good and honest man! (and his brother and eldest son are so angels, either. Let’s not even talk about the wife, omigod). Arrgh! Maybe I should just stop now before I rant some more and write something I might regret later like oh say ‘I hope Mike A. kicks the bucket.’
So I’ll stop.
—-
Because of the four day Lenten Break I hadn’t been able to keep up with the news. It was only yesterday that I read about how the military shot and killed a nine-year old girl in Compostela Valley, Grecil Galacio. She had just finished grade two, was into the latest dance crazes popularized by shows like Eat Bulaga and Wowwowwee, and liked playing with spiders.
She was killed by members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ 101st Infantry Battalion, and the commander of said IB, Brigadier General Carlos Holganza says that he stands pat behind his men in saying that the girl’s brutal murder was all part of the campaign against the New People’s Army (NPA). Grecil, Holganza says, was an NPA guerilla.
They found no gun near Grecil’s body (or maybe it was an imaginary gun and Grecil was pretending to be firing it in the direction of the soldiers hiding in the trees or among the bushes?)
Her classmates insist that she was an ordinary little girl  (maybe not so ordinary because she was smart and sometimes got into trouble - she liked to daydream I think, sitting near the river, looking for spiders, weaving stories in her little head).
Grecil’s parents are distraught (they raised her, fed and clothed her, loved her all the while even as she forget to tell them about the recognition rites at school where she was supposed to receive a couple of awards as a good student and then one afternoon through the sunlight and the silence shots ring out and there they find their child, their little one, lying in the backyard in the dust and among the pebbles and the budding shoots of grass her bloodied arm, her skull shattered pierced by bullets from an M16.  Their Grecil. All of nine years, cold, dead, shot to death by soldiers who now insist that she, when alive, was a threat to them and to the Government of the Republic of the Philippines  because she, Grecil all of nine years old, was  a member of the NPA).

She wasn’t what the soldiers said she was; her bewildered parents insist that she was just their little girl. Now no one will know what Grecil could have been.

—-
Oh Little One!
Collector of fighting spiders,
Dancing to novelty songs,
Daydreamer by the river,
You will be remembered.
You who sang loudly
Often out of tune
But still with attempts at melody
You will not be forgotten.
The innocent image of you,
Laughing and lively
Then suddenly lifeless
Will be remembered.
They who took your life
With bullets, with hatred
With twisted reasoning
And defiant, even arrogant pride
Their crime
Will not be forgotten.
—–

Panoorin!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMohSv6n8Oo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7psfqtXRB3g&mode=related&search=

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