Children and Courage from a Distance: An Exile's Viewpoint

This is self-serving: it is about children. In a more specific sense, it is about my children as I look at them from afar. It is this distance that affords my this view--and the view is particular, personal, with the emotions pent-up.

First, the first born. I call him to do many things for me, like laying out flyers I need in my work of running a heritage program thousands of miles away from home. In the last few years, the son has begun to understand what linguistic democracy is all about, what cultural justice is all, and what is that intricate connection between these and the issues of human rights.

It pays that in college, he wrote a philosophy thesis on language, and on the national language for that matter. That experience made him see some of the things I was blabbering about long before he realized that something is awfully wrong about the 'national' language concept of the homeland, with that privileging that has been accorded to only one language while the rest of the languages are made to languish in that imprisoning reality of 'nation' and 'nationalism.'

I talk to him. I tell him to go to that linguistics seminar in Baguio. He tells me: Yes, I am thinking. And then he says: "Pero kailangan kong tapusin ang mga grade ng mga bata."

Maituloyto... (mapanak pay agsagad iti bulbulong...)