This is one thing we hate to discuss: when Filipinos imitate a tradition that is not ours. The New Year is on Jan. 1. The New Year celebration last Friday belongs to the Chinese but lo and behold, considering that Pres. Pnoy came from a Chinese ascendancy, he declared Friday as a non-working holiday. We don't have a problem with that declaration. What we don't like is imitating the Chinese tradition of celebrating the New Year especially the feng shui. We even don't have any problem with children enrolled with the Bohol Wisdom School celebrating the New Year last Friday by wearing the Chinese custom even if their faces are more than a Filipino. That is a matter of choice of their parents, who perhaps, would like to be called Chinese even if they are not. Someone in the social media labeled Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte greeting people last Friday with “kung choy, fatyon” and we assume you know what is meant by that.

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So instead of the “kung hei fat choy" greeting, what was attributed to the Davao City mayor is his campaign in his city against drug addicts called in the street language as “choy” who usually end up being salvaged in the seawaters there in the world largest city. Well, the story behind this elucidation is adopting non-Filipino values and tradition into our own Filipino system. Especially so that everybody in this country wanted to be like Chinese, and like them, became rich in our society without doing anything. Thus, we also use their vocabulary in order to spark something into our minds. This is especially so that in the illegal drug business, most of the stakeholders there are also Chinese. We start from the drug addicts, the drug suppliers, the drug lords and even to lawyers who defend illegal drug suspects in courts.

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Now, let's go to Vhong, not Bong. Bong Revilla and his privilege speech the other week were already forgotten. We even forgot already who Janet Napoles is. We can no longer recall in our minds what is the meaning of PDAF. Nobody is already updating the aftershocks, the effects of Yolanda and the electric power hike. Everybody in this country is now talking about three persons only this week. They are Vhong Navarro, Deniece Cornejo and Cedric Lee and the so-called mauling, attempted rape and everything involving these three leading personalities. What is happening even to the Filipino intellectual who also joined the discussion of the so-called Condo episode? Have they joined the level of the ordinary Filipino masses? We can only heave a deep sigh of consternation.

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Because of this Vhong incident which is highlighted in the media including the Facebook, which they now call as part of the social media, we no longer know the signing of the peace agreement last week between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Kuala Lumpur establishing the Bangsamoro in Mindanao. The government and the MILF have signed the last annex of the Bangsamoro framework, sealing the peace pact that is accordingly seeks to end the decades-long Muslim secessionist movement in the country Problem is, there is another breakaway faction now fighting against the government military forces in Maguindanao. The Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) rebels proclaimed to be the military arm of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Movement (BIFM).

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We have written about the Muslim conflict in Mindanao in a journal edited by the late Prof. Eddie Babor and which was published here. This article came out when Fidel V. Ramos entered into a peace agreement with Nur Misuari. If our memory serves us right, the title of our article was “Ano Ba Talaga, Kuya Eddie?” In a nutshell, we have been elucidating how the Muslim conflict in Mindanao seems to be a never-ending process. When Sec. Edwin Lacierda announced last week that “We have an agreement!” He was so excited over the signing of the peace pact with the MILF in Malaysia. Lacierda and his boss, Pres. Pnoy, do not really understand this concept of the Muslim conflict. We have been there in Mindanao from birth until our childhood. We too suffered the Christian-Muslim conflict which cannot be simply solved by entering into a peace pact.

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POSTSCRIPT: We spent the weekend with activities to elongate the birthday celebration of retired P/Supt. Erlinde Bantugan starting with a mañanita on Tuesday morning, followed by a road trip to Loboc for a river cruise which did not materialize last Friday due to Typhoon Basyang and then to Beth and Choy in Catigbian today. What a week-long celebration ...There's more when we return.