Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

"Hiya" "amor-propio" "compadre"...and series of local sociological concepts rolls off the pages of a cultural learning book detailing the tendencies of Filipino behaviors.  All of these, foreign-sounding at the first sight, after even the most brief of explanations, become terribly familiar for someone who has seen perhaps a bit too much of the collectivist values so ingrained within Asian societies .  It is as the author said so well in the prologue, Filipino society, despite its Western-looking facade of English use, Christian beliefs, and American cultural affinity due 400 years of Western colonization, is not at all a Western society at heart.

The rusty old box on wheels "sped along" the Emilio Aguinaldo Highway south of Manila as fast as I could...which, unfortunately for the anxious traveler, was not that much.  Sitting on the long wooden chairs of the long-distance bus, the traveler kept staring out of the glass-less window to see just how long the traffic will continue to crawl forward.  The bus was moving so slowly on the two-lane "national highway" that the wind coming through the open windows cannot compensate for the heat of the early morning sun and the body fumes of the massive crowds squeezed into the already over-capacity bus.

At the foothills of the magnificent Taal Volcano, two hours drive south of Manila, there is a little two-story concrete building.  It is a building no different from any other local ones that stand densely across the highway from the luxuries resorts, restaurants, and private homes that crowd the Tagaytay Ridge offering perfect, unobstructed view of the Volcano's surrounding lake fromed from an ancient crater.  On the second floor of the building was a little sign: Hansung Vision Church (한성 비전 교회), pasted in strips of simple blue-colored plastic tape over a background picture of green field dotted with pink flowers.

The streets down below are steamy with fumes, all sorts of fumes.  One can almost smell all that as one gets off the crowded platform of the nearby train station.  It is, as many other places of humanity are, a chaotic symphony of sensory overload of any and every nature.  The smell is a combination of toxic exhaust fumes belched from inefficient jeepney engines, the heavily salted batter of fried chicken, fried fish, and fried God-knows-what-else.

Your blogger here has always considered himself above the typical racial stereotyping that goes on in societies around the world .  He tries to see only individuals and their unique personalities, some of which are component traits that can be observed in a diversity of different societies with little interaction (such as individualism, optimism, rebelliousness against the status quo).  But residing and bonding with people who are eager to resort to certain "national/ethnic characters" as the primary means of making sense of their own existences and their places in the world, he finds himself gradually succumbing to similar tendencies...

Every time another shooting rampage occurs in America, the first instinct of nearly anyone who hears about the tragic news is to blame the lack of gun control.  They somehow believe that more strict access to guns is the ultimate resolution of such problems.  While the author is just as much a proponent of gun control as the next leftist, he also believes that sort of random killing that occurred in a Connecticut elementary school says much more about how America's culture create lethal-minded deviants rather than how America's gun culture lead to lethal incidents.