Saturday, April 23, 2011
A specialist (read earlier wish, expressed just below)? Fat chance! Since I left mainstream media, I have gone into crafts; enjoyed the organizational, communications, and social/educational/ developmental/human relations challenges that came with being president for two years of my high school alumni association; line-edited for two specialized monthly magazines for four years; copy-edited a health guidebook and a public administration handbook; and conducted an editing workshop for career magazine editors.
My next work will be an equally mixed bag, since I have agreed to: 1) share with young students and editors via seminars and workshops the writing and editing skills honed through my four decades in radio, television, and print; 2) assist a sociopreneurial program that will set up livelihood development enterprises on the barangay level in target municipalities in the country; and 3) organize a comprehensive data bank of updated international agriculture and aquaculture research and information. I'm so looking forward to the exciting demands of these new involvements.
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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
As editorial page editor of a small evening daily, I had to set a daily routine for myself. (I actually did, in every job I took on--from radio to television to trade to mainstream print.) I copyread the columnists' pieces that had already been encoded or uploaded to the server; checked the foreign wires, picked possible fillers, copyread them; moved back to work on columnists' pieces that were uploaded late; and wrote my column on days I was scheduled to come up with one. The one heavy of every day involved writing the editorial/s.
At the paper's start, I was writing two editorials every day. It was punishing, and telling: The quality of the editorials suffered. Which was probably the reason the daily's first publisher decided to assign other editors to contribute editorials on certain days of the week. Some days, though, I still had to write both editorials--or fill up the lower half of the space with a short piece based on a story from the wires. The two editorials below, which appeared on the same day, are an example--both part of a day's work.
On days when I had to write two editorials, my layout artist and I were often the last people to leave the office, usually in the early morning hours, between 2 and 3.
Exciting as it was to prove I could hack it in the world of the dailies, the job was also in many ways a personally limiting experience. It certainly frustrated that part of me, fed in my years in trade journalism, that yearned to be a specialist. I certainly didn't want to be a jack of all trades. I wanted to cultivate, nourish, and keep on top of a field I could claim as my own.
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Editorials, The Evening Paper
Issue of 21 March 1995
In the midst of a national crisis (and nobody can call it any less now), let us not lose our humanity.
For such alone will distinguish us from the Singapore government, the humaneness of which we now question, openly and publicly.
Through the benighted episodes in our colonial and postwar years, we always carried ourselves with dignity and decorum. Looking back at our history, we can say with confidence that it was never when the Filipino people were in crisis that their worst surfaced; it was, rather, when fortune smiled at individual Filipinos that virtues disappeared and vices surfaced.
We still look back to the days of struggle against the dictatorship, witnessed by the rest of the world, days that defined the true glory of Filipino courage and dignity. During that uncertain period, as we fought our own internal war against greed and tyranny, we showed ourselves worthy and fitting models of innate grace and true spirituality. In those days, the Filipino soul was laid bare for all the world to see--and it was beautiful.
These are similar days. Once again, we are caught in a struggle, this time the struggle to establish justice for all our countrymen, wherever they may be. No longer is this the case of one domestic helper sentenced and hanged in Singapore. This, now, is the case of all Filipino overseas contract workers serving in foreign lands.
It is easy for us, if we forget the bigger dimensions of the struggle and instead focus only on the very narrow confines of one life and one case, to slough off the essence of our humanity. How personally satisfying it is to strike back, to claim another life for the life that was given up, to foist destruction on those foreigners who destroyed--and those countrymen who helped destroy--Flor. An eye for an eye, so they say.
But can we continue to be proud if we go against every principle of decency and humanity with which our ancestors carved our own unique history of national struggle in centuries past? Will we be able to do better for our countrymen caught in difficult circumstances abroad? And will we be true to ourselves if we do?
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The burden on our children's backsOver a year ago, the United States government and American retail establishments made a big thing about the use of child labor in Asian factories manufacturing goods for the US market. The trade brouhaha--and the subsequent "Buy American" campaign launched by US retailers--only very slightly camouflaged American manufacturers' economic fears. The prices of the imported products were too low for US industry to match.
The targets of the campaign at the time were the countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan, where out-of-school children were being recruited, willingly, to provide cheap labor in export-oriented factories.
Even then, the situation was one the United States found impossible to influence to any great extent. Chronic poverty in many Asian countries has made it a virtual necessity for children to work.
In Bangladesh alone, more than three million poor children are at work in cities, taking on all available jobs from picking through the day's garbage to prostitution. According to Social Welfare Department statistics, the country's working children constitute 12 percent of the national workforce. For at least eight hours of work a day, child laborers receive an average wage of 10 taka (US 25 cents) a day, or over $90 a year, considerably less than Bangladesh's annual per capita income of $210.
No wonder many industries, especially those which must compete in price-sensitive export markets, find it to their advantage to employ children.
The Bangladesh government has taken heed of the complaints of US manufacturers, but its ability to change the situation is in doubt. Over 50 percent of families comprising the country's total population of 110 million live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.
If the children are banned from working in factories, claimed an official of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, "most of the girls will probably turn to prostitution."
One 11-year-old shoeshine boy who plies his trade on the streets of Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, said, "If I become jobless, my entire family will starve."
Here is another face of life for the underprivileged in Asia's Third World countries. With governments unable to promise their families anything, the children--through their cheap labor--must bear the brunt of poverty.
-- NBT
