LMWD’s faucet water much better today, July 12, as ‘planned’

Did you remember that I wrote here last February 2 that the Leyte Metropolitan Water District would be doing its best to improve its water service by July 12? Well, July 12 is now. Find out for yourself how improved is the service.

Actually, as early as the first week of June, water service had already started improving. Efforts were painstakingly made to hit the July 12 goal which I defined in this column. The actual target completion date set by the LMWD (which still holds its main office at Mabini street, Tacloban, towards the port area), according to an insider , is sometime in December this year. However, QN cracked the inside info, leaving LMWD’s best think tanks no other choice but to prove its earnest sincerity to provide a better flowing water. The efforts, which included installation of so big pipes starting from near the town of Palo and going towards the only highly urbanized city of Eastern Visayas (Region VIII) produced murky water one evening towards the Patron ha Tacloban. It must have been the first test run.

Since my revelation here last February, if QN followers noticed, this writer hasn’t been commenting obliquely to the very poor quality water service that LMWD had been rendering to Taclobanons. That was in keeping with my commitment to allow LMWD its finest time, although an objective editorial, several weeks after QN lightened its brake load on that poor service, had to set straight a sin of nonfeasance in obedience to a city government requirement.

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The Philippines must start recognizing its national artists once they make even only one great contribution to the cause for which this class of Filipinos and Filipinas national recognition is in store. This country should not wait until the deserving individuals are nearing death or are already departed. Since such a recognition equates with a nation’s strength, it should be awarded to the exemplary contributor while he or she is strong. Awarding it at the point of death can only mean that this country is actually failing in its efforts towards achieving greatness or towards an achievement that is deemed noteworthy to an objective cause. Given as a posthumous citation, it conveys the ill meaning that this country’s efforts at anything worthwhile will always die, and , ergo, are actually a failure.

By how acculturated things have been going here, we can easily conclude that this country’s leadership on this realm fails to notice that many individual Filipinos are actually making their own great contributions, only that theirs are deprived of lavish, if not just academic, attention. Such contributors actually know they themselves have gone one leap higher and that because no one has cared about that feat, they opt to keep it to themselves. They reward themselves with a self-recognition bestowal that consists in proving to themselves that they can do more, or do better, or better more than what they have just proven to themselves. For example, a poor lad who gets rich after disappearing from a dirty corner in Philippine society is not even extended a congratulating hand by so-called judges of culture. Since the now wealthy lad had known in his moments of destitution how cruel social emperors and empresses are looking at things, he decides to eventually make himself the manager of the resources around him, including rich persons and their own wealth, prowess and power. There are many Filipinos like this lad.

The craziest among the rulers of Philippine culture and arts continue look askance at every aspiring person’s best efforts. Even they themselves engage in cerebral conflict on how to appreciate criteria for evaluating and selecting a national artist. The wrong message conveyed to children: it’s bad to be considered for proclamation as a national artist. And so? Better no such proclamation at all!

It’s crazy the selectors cannot understand themselves why they cannot pick and proclaim at least one artist each day. In the form of a question, the observation on the matter goes this way: Who among those already proclaimed as national artists have heard or seen others similarly cited declaring that they had been inspired by them? Obviously a dead national artist could not witness a testimony adulating his or her preceding accomplishment.

The death-related exaltation inveteracy in the Philippines could have been copied from the rare practice by the Roman Catholic church of canonizing saints. Some Basaynon and Taclobanon senior high school students want it radically modified to one genuinely original and meant for the dynamically living extraordinaire Filipino achievers. Let’s join them in their wishful salutation: Mabuhi hi Erap! Mabuhi hi Eddie (Garcia)! Mabuhi hi Meyor! But what can this nation do by now? The “comedy king”, Dolphy (Rodolfo Vera Quizon) bid goodbye to all at past eight o’clock last Tuesday (July 10) evening at the Makati Medical Center. He was 83, and I loved him for all the good things that he had done as my national artist. He was born on July 25,1928 in Tondo, Manila and had 18 children many years later. President Benigno S. Aquino III awarded him in November, 2010 the highest award that a Philippine President can give a private Filipino citizen, the “Grand Collar of the Order of the Golden Heart” for his contributions to the entertainment industry and charitable and philanthropic works. Nine years earlier (2001), in Belgium, Brussels, he, with his sons Eric and Jeffrey, “won the Prix de la Meilleure Interpretation for playing Walterina Markova, a transvestite in the movie Markova: Comfort Gay”, according to Wikipedia. Last June this year, the Manila government awarded him the Gawad na Diwa ng Lahi, the highest given to artists. My commiseration. Condolences to the bereaved family of Dolphy.

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‘Here two important points must be emphasized. The first, which has been stated before but should be repeated here, is the dependence of rational knowledge upon perceptual knowledge. Anyone who thinks that rational knowledge need not be derived from perceptual knowledge is an idealist. In the history of philosophy there is the “rationalist” school that admits the reality only of reason and not of experience, believing that reason alone is reliable while perceptual experience is not; this school errs by turning things upside down. The rational is reliable precisely because it has its source in sense perceptions, other wise it would be like water without a source, a tree without roots, subjective, self-engendered and unreliable. As to the sequence in the process of cognition, perceptual experience comes first; we stress the significance of social practice in the process of cognition precisely because social practice alone can give rise to human knowledge and it alone can start man on the acquisition of perceptual experience from the objective world. For a person who shuts his eyes, stops his ears and totally cuts himself off from the objective world there can be no such thing as knowledge. Knowledge begins with experience–this is the materialism of the theory of knowledge.

‘The second point is that knowledge needs to be deepened, that the perceptual stage of knowledge needs to be developed to the rational stage–this is the dialectics of the theory of knowledge. To think that knowledge can stop at the lower, perceptual stage and that perceptual knowledge alone is reliable while rational knowledge is not, would be to repeat the historical error of “empiricism”. This theory errs in failing to understand that, although the data of perception reflect certain realities in the objective world (I am not speaking here of idealist empiricism which confines experience to so-called introspection), they are merely one-sided and superficial, reflecting things incompletely and not reflecting their essence.

By: Chito Dela Torre

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