by Ted Tuvera Posted on 03/05/2014 11:15 PM |Updated 03/06/2014 2:15 PM

As a kid, I grew up with a dream of serving God and my country. I'm now 18 and I'm branded as a rebel."

Priesthood has always been perceived as a rather radical path among young wits I grew up with. My peers had always been for their American dreams of engineering, accountancy, commerce, education for such are deemed ventures on future financial stability and security. Looking back now, perhaps, my college course on journalism is not a sure job choice.

The former was an aspiration that sprouted from the noble lives of Francis and Augustine, who were heroes to me when I was in the critical stage of high school. Their mere mortal perfection led me to that idealism of fulfilling Matthew 6:24 to its most literal sense: I even fantasized a more highfaluting step on the religious vow of poverty.

Quarters before graduation, I became open to a lot of (what I now declare as) bourgeois liberalism that made me, in the spirit of maturity, see life in different perspectives: new-age religion or theosophy, the political satires of Lourd de Veyra, the blasphemous art of Mideo Cruz, the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll music of Guns n Roses, Noli and Fili, nudity as a form of art, and a lot more of counter-culture. I ended up critical on religion, thus, ending my saintly deeds with the Church.

In the same period, I became acquainted with activists. Yes, the leftists. This acquaintance motivated the shift of my childhood radicalism in favor of the peoples struggle. The reality of how peasants are brutally terrorized in the countryside, on how the workers are facing the dreadful working conditions despite hazardous jobs, and, why, despite the hard work they do, are they poor while landlords and big capitalists are very rich? And a more critical inquiry: why, despite the Philippines rich natural resources, are the masses still in poverty?

Stop. Look. Listen. They are just reminders of what young people today do not care about for the contrary worship of popular, mainstream culture. Dispel the brainwashing conspiracies, such basic realities that are now graded as propagandas must be an injury-causing slap for those who enjoy the comforts of a blindfolded society.

We do not need to argue ideologies on basically observing the unequal military and economic relations of the US and the Philippines. Why are they allowed to sail along some of our vast seas while local fisher folks are not? Why are big foreign companies encouraged to invest widely in the Philippines because of raw material resources that are very much available and on the contrary why is it that there is no national industry of our own? Why is it that there is no auto industry in the Philippines despite the engineering geniuses and raw materials present in the Philippines? Sure enough, we are not a bobo people.

One with the masses

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On being Catholic and leftist