4:30 p.m.

[ 'course, that title doesn't mean anything unless you remember what yesterday's was. *chuckle* Go there if you haven't read it yet, on account of there being lots of cool links to weblogs you just might have missed reading.

N-e-weigh, I just came online to flip the page for now and say that I'll write later (perhaps even about something related to the title, ha). Lots of daylight still left over here, and possible post-Xmas sales of neat diving and snorkeling gear to check into, in various nearby dive shops. Zo. Tally ho, until later... ]

9:30 p.m.

So I've been wracking my brains for the last half hour now, trying to remember who it was who wrote in their weblog recently about "tomorrow" and how strange it is because it never really comes... or something like that. I even tried searching through the past week's weblogs of some likely candidates (Kati, Fletcher, Candace) to no avail. If it was you, dear reader, let me know... as I do not wish to continue questioning my sanity in this manner. ;-) Anyway, my angle on the Mohammed and Moses stuff was the hopeful, certainly idealistic, notion that their descendants will learn to live together "tomorrow."

Then again, as that mysterious weblogger in my mind said... tomorrow never comes. And so it is still, today: the followers of Mohammed and Moses are still at it, still at each others' throats, as they have been for the last few millennia, and who appear to continue doing so, on into the endless present, forever without end. (Sort of like that sentence. *chuckle*) But seriously, just today, news reports from the Middle East have it that the summit talks in Egypt between Israeli and Palestinian leaders have collapsed. Oy vey ist zu mir. So what else is new? It has been this way since time immemorial between these two tribes descended of Abraham, and even the best intentions of well-meaning statesmen in the present haven't changed matters much. Yet it is the right thing to try anyway. And it is this aspect of America in the world today -- being a "global policeman" and brokering peace in the Middle East, for example -- that I find basically good and worthy of praise. Sure, America must act in her own enlightened self-interest, but who doesn't. Anyway, no other country on the planet will do what America is doing, for the simple reason that none have either the vision or the willingess to do so, nevermind actual power in global realpolitik.

midnight...

I remember the feet most of all. Well, that's all that I really saw: mostly bare feet, some in socks, a few with a boot on. Through the years I've told myself I saw dried blood in there somewhere, but I think that's my imagination getting carried away with itself. I was with my grandpa Max and grandma Gregoria, dragged unwillingly by them on one of their dawn exercise walks in Magsaysay Park, in the southern Philippine city of Davao. That one time, we saw the Army trucks, 2 maybe 3 of them I'm not sure any more... bringing in dead Philippine Army soldiers, casualties in the war against the Muslims. Grandpa explained later that they were snuck in like that early in the morning, so as not to alarm the rest of the Christian populace of the city. But we saw the dead soldiers. I saw them. The bodies neatly stacked on top of each other, legs and feet extending out at the back of the trucks. I pointed them out to my grandparents as this gruesome procession sped past the park on their way to the military stockade, and so the burden fell on my grandparents to explain. I think I was about 8 or 9 years old then, and saw everything, and asked about everything, just like any boy that age.

We had our own civil war in the Philippines, too. Our own southern secessionist rebellion. But instead of slave-owners who first fought for states' rights and then their own Confederacy, there were Muslims who wanted their own autonomous government and country. I grew up in the island of Mindanao, where the Muslim secessionist movement began, and which continues to this day. There was a war going on when I was in elementary and high school, on the very island we lived in. We didn't see much of it at all, aside from that one time I saw the dead Army soldiers at dawn, but we knew what was going on. Even in Mindanao, the Muslims were a small minority, and not all that visible even. I remember asking someone once what that odd little building was, which stood in the slum area by the seacoast, which had a moon symbol atop a minaret, instead of the cross above a steeple. I was told that it was a temple for the Moro people in the city. (That term was used derogatorily, instead of the more apt "Muslim.")

I never saw any more dead soldiers after that one time, but we were well aware that a war raged not far from the city, in Southern Mindanao. After my family left Davao City for the capital, in the early 70s, things took a turn for the worse in the south, as open-air markets and theatres were the target for bombing attacks, though it was never really clear if it was the Communist insurgency or the Muslim rebels who were to blame. Living in Manila, we feared for our friends and family still living in Davao. Looking back at that time, the whole thing was a strange amalgam of safe abstraction and violent reality that we lived through. Those dead soldiers were real enough, the newspaper and radio accounts factual enough, but the whole aura of the war against the Muslims had a distant feel to it, even if it was taking place on our island. The continuing guerrilla engagements and brutal ambushes were fodder for the Marcos military dictatorship to continue its campaign against the secessionists, but as all schoolchildren knew, the Muslims of Mindanao were NEVER militarily subjugated -- not by the Spaniards in three whole centuries, not by the Americans in their own 50 years as colonial masters, not by the vaunted Japanese military in World War 2, and certainly not by their Filipino brothers in the Philippine Army when civil war finally came in the 60s. It was common knowledge that the Muslims were brave and skilled guerrilla fighters, and well-equipped with arms, munitions, and money from certain Arab countries, Libya in particular. It was just that, in the bigger picture, there were too few of them, and scattered in too many isolated pockets of resistance for them to be able to push out the well-entrenched Catholic majority of people who were now living in the Philippine south.

This situation still exists today. The Philippine government continues to wage military campaigns against the Muslims, and for their part a confusing and ever-changing welter of Muslim factions continues to fight the Philippine Army. Muslim extremist groups have taken to kidnapping Westerners (including some guy from Oakland last fall) for ransom or as political hostages. The Philippines' own civil war continues to rage, desultorily at times, bloodily sustained at others. The analogous situation in America would be if Robert E. Lee never surrendered at Appomatox Courthouse and to this day his rebel descendants continue to wage a guerrilla campaign from isolated outposts all over the south. It is an absurd notion, of course. But my point here is that Philippine history, from whence I and my family came, is nothing if not a vivid mix of the absurd and the mundane.

My childhood took place where there was a civil war, one that continues to this day; and somehow, by the grace of the universe, I and my family escaped all that. And I can't help but believe that because of these facts... I live my life a certain way, look at people and relationships in a particular manner, and sometimes see the world through broken lenses. By all rights, I should be cynical and lost, but I know I am not, and perhaps you see this too. So, there is a conclusion to be drawn here... but you'll have to make it yourself. If not right now, then later on, as you continue reading this space through an ever-receding tomorrow.

And it doesn't really matter if you choose to have Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed or Moses or all of the above help you interpret what you read... so long as you read openly, with heart to hear and mind to see.

{ net.casting }
^