I haven’t paid attention to TV for over six years now, but today I couldn’t cast it aside so easily. What was on? Local news.
Talk of the water hyacinth invasion in Cotabato was worrisome and frustrating– 200,000 hectares of hardy plants on the offense, surely no match for 2 backhoes! It’s a real life attack-of-the-killer-bees/ants/corn and in a man-vs-nature scenario, what chance does man have, really? What more the ill-equipped Pinoy? Then news of shared classrooms came on– shared not between sections but between grade levels: grade 1 kids sitting almost next to grade 2 kids in small circles around their teachers. Who can learn in an environment like this, and especially when simply learning is not enough anymore, when what is needed is for children to learn well?
Switching channels got me to Willie’s show–and I realized I didn’t even know he was back on TV.
I’ve been so out of touch, thinking all this time that I was being responsible. I banished TV from my everyday life because it got too noisy, too cluttered, and I just assumed (or convinced myself) I wasn’t missing out. I still had the internet and twitter for news updates, and I got to stay “in touch” with the world through filters of my choosing.
But have I really been in touch? Six years of no TV (and no newspapers, no radio, no magazines) and how different have my everydays turned out?
When you retreat into a cave, you get to work on your inner circle–all the things within reach. But there comes a point when you realize your world has gotten so small, that keeping the noise out has become just a vain exercise. Maybe because you’ve recharged for so long, you have so much surplus energy, and you actually owe it to those who haven’t had your luxury to put it to good use “out there”.
The same old questions are still there– who will save the Philippines? What can I do?