THE firestorm in social media and printed media about Manny Pacquiao’s statements on same-sex marriage started from Granville Ampong’s article in Examiner.com on May 12, 2012.
Ampong’s statements went beyond what Manny Pacquiao said. Here are some excerpts from what Ampong wrote:
“The rabbis understood the command to love our fellow humans as including both love and honor. Be careful to honor all people, with the thought that you are thereby giving honor to God, because they are the work of God’s hands, God’s creatures.” –Avot d’ Rabbi Natan via Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God.
While I was in Costa Rica exploring trails in national parks (upon the invitation of my good friend, Caroline Kennedy), I noticed genuine loving displays of endearment. Each word uttered from folks that I met were shared with loving tones and laced with tenderness. “May I? Would you like to? May I do this?”
“NON-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of Mankind. It is the supreme law. By it alone can mankind be saved.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” - Albert Einstein
It is only fitting that the Asian Law Caucus’(ALC) celebrate its 40th Anniversary. Without the ALC, there would be more segregated housing, more displaced tenants of color and less citizens registering to vote. There would be less immigrants transitioning to become citizens, more stolen wages from workers, more unchallenged deportations and internments unchallenged.
It was courageous community lawyering done by Dale Minani, with research work done by his colleagues. They reversed that chapter of US history, turning civil discriminatory wrongs into the opposite, and restoring civil rights to folks of color.
Last Updated ( Friday, 04 May 2012 22:31 )
Read more...I WAS reading Rumi’s verse “[as] you live deeper in the heart, the mirror gets clearer and clearer.” I got to a similar realization by observing folks. I came to believe that life is a choice – to live a life of highest energies of loving yourself and others, or to live a life with a heart full of dark energies and toxic darkness, that being around you is like being pricked by sharp cactus spines.
Do you have the courage to live as a person with bright light within you? That being with you makes one feel your inner radiance? That you seem light in volume? Let me illustrate, using three examples: Yoshiki and two unnamed folks.
“AND the young man with the serious look on his face, out there at the back of the room, raises his hand and asks: ‘How do you know that what you do is the best that you can do?’ Our answer – perhaps as good as yours – calls for working in terms of integrity, validity and accessibility. Surely these words cannot be too frightening. A reader enters a piece of writing only when it is accessible, enjoys it when its parts are valid enough to hold together, and endorses it in admiration when he realizes that its author has put something of himself on the line. For the writer, the process must work in reverse. In the end it is the work that matters.” – NVM Gonzalez, Work on the Mountain, 1995.
One weekend, NVM Gonzalez visited, while he was UCLA’s Regents Professor of Philippine Literature in English. In his class on literature, some of his youngish UCLA students had already published poems and short stories.
