NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

When the US Department of Defense released their Draft Environmental Impact Statement for their proposed military buildup to Guam, you could see both the potential danger involved and the community's reaction in simple numbers. The size of the DEIS in terms of page numbers was close to unbelievable. At 11,000 or so pages, you could not help but wonder about the potential impacts the plans would represent to Guam. If it took 11,000 pages to describe it and discuss it, how could it be good? Shouldn't the massive volume of pages required to articulate it be a sign of danger? The community responded with more than 10,000 comments, many of which were critical of the buildup. A significant response, close to one for each page of that infernal document. When I recall that a JGPO representative said to me that they were anticipating just "500 on the high side" I feel that through a variety of activists means, people began to question the buildup and how much it might bene

Social movements, protest movements, radical change movements always work in cycles. They can be difficult to sustain, especially when they operate primarily at an organic, grassroots level. There will be periods of great activity and then periods where nothing much seems to happen. Depending on how you see things, it can sometimes appear as if too much protesting is going on, because you don't perceive the gaps, or it can appear as if not enough is happening and something, some opportunity is being lost in the process. You can list the factors involved in order to better understand how this works, but part of it will always elude you. As they say in Chamorro, "Si Yu'us, Yu'us. I taotao, taotao ha'." Each in their own way is a mystery. Si Yu'us and his/her mysterious ways, structurally incomprehensible to everyone. The impossibility of it is meant to be a test of faith, the ultimate pledge of loyalty without any guarantee that anything you do really ma

As the focus is drawn away from Pagat, we must remain vigilante. Pagat was the buzzword for several years in terms of conceiving and resisting the buildup for many people. It is surreal the way it came to stand beside other terms such as "jobs" or "economy" in the way people imagined the buildup. It was one of the first critical or negative things that made it into the conversation to help counter much of the unrealistic positive perceptions of the buildup that were out there.  Pagan, a word so similar sounding to Pagat, will most likely be the next buzzword. As it is far north in the Gani Islands, it remains to be seen if it can be given the same visibility and transformative power that Pagat received.  ****************************** "On Pagat and Our Continuing Concerns" By Senator Ben Pangelinan Marianas Variety September 19, 2013  RECENT information from the Joint Guam Program Office (JGPO) indicated that the infor

Karlo Dizon had a column in the PDN yesterday that disappointed me. I was told by so many people during the election last year that Karlo Dizon is smart and someone with a real future in Guam politics. When I heard him speak during the campaign I found his emphasis on data and statistic to be interesting and in a way refreshing, but also worried that this would make him too "wonky." The eternal debate that takes place within voters is whether to vote for someone who is 1. better/smarter than they are, 2. someone they see as their equals, 3. someone that they see as being inferior to them and therefore makes themselves feel superior. For someone like Barack Obama, many people vote for him because of that feeling that he is more intelligent and articulate than they are and that is the way a leader should be. For someone like George W. Bush, alot of his popularity comes from the feeling of him being equal to or inferior to voters. Bush was safe, he didn't make you feel stu

There has been so much discussion lately about the "positions" of people, especially politicians on the military buildup. The concept of the buildup has been discussed so much for the past seven years, you could think there might be nothing left to say. You might assume that after years of debates, revelations, protests and so on, we might have finally come to the point where the buildup might hold no new ideological turns. It might just simply be a thing that has been hollowed out of all ideological ore and so people can speak about it in banal and normal ways. You could assume these things and for the most part you'd be right. The years of debate did help bring into the world and into reality the buildup as an idea. Less people believe the hype about it and I mean this on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Less people believe in the buildup as a golden ticket, but also far fewer people believe in it as a rampaging beast. In the early days of buildup discussion s

One of the unfortunate things about writing a column for a newspaper is the space limitations. Often times I'm discussing important topics and I can't do justice to it, can't say anything close to what I want to see or even feel I need to say. One such moment came last week in my column "Corruption in Context" in the Marianas Variety. In the column I discussed how people come to see the Department of Defense or the military in an extremely skewed way. As a place where there is no corruption, where everything is equal, based on merit, and handled in the right way. People see the military through nicely kept yards, proud serving men and women and cheaper gas that helps in the fight for freedom. In contrast to this image, the Department of Defense is interestingly enough, the largest, most corrupt, most incompetent and most inefficient part of the Federal government of the United States. Although I mentioned this point, given the space limitations, I was not able t

I just noticed that I passed a pretty big milestone yesterday. As you can see from the image to the left, I recently passed 300,000 hits on this blog. This means that according to Statcounter, pages on this blog have been loaded 300,000 times, and it does not necessarily mean that 300,000 people have read my blog ( olaha mohon na taiguihi). What's weird is that if I follow the internal counter that Blogger uses, then I've had 300,000 hits for quite a while, since Blogger's counter always counts twice as much as Statcounter. Needless to say, this is an exciting day for me and my blog. I started this blog in August 2004, and this post is my 1,431th. I meant to commemorate the 7th year of this blog last month, lao maleffa yu'. In 2004, my blog posts were brutally short. Sometimes one or two sentences, sometimes a paragraph. Sometimes I would post several tiny posts in a day. Although I only had this blog for 4 months in 2004, I still posted 120 times, meaning at least

Last week the Pacific Daily News, the most powerful and most influential media outlet on Guam which has been a longstanding devout mouthpiece for the military buildup, burying much of the negatives but always careful to blazon in sometimes stupid ways any potential or even mythically positive, provided this in a way far more clearly than ever before. Each week the PDN hosts a Sunday forum where people in the community who are knowledgable about a subject are invited to write in letters to the editor addressing said subject. Last week's topic was about whether or not people who support the military buildup should voice their opinion. Most topics are about issues where there is a pretense to address the subject in a comprehensive way, or at least from two sides. In this instance no such pretense existed and it was merely a ploy to create a space for supporters of the buildup could crame the editorial pages of the PDN with pointless platitudes of how awesome the buildup is and how eve

I've been writing for months that "pro-buildup" groups on Guam have been strangely silent lately. The overtly pro-build side of Guam was for years the richest and most powerful on Guam, and nothing has changed. But for more than a year, those captains of industry and influence appeared to almost live in fear of small, protest and activist groups. They seemed content to sit on the sidelines and not just lick their wounds, but suck every drop of life from them, to keep from getting back into the debate and try to actually argue their side, and try to convince people, beyond the pointless rhetoric that the buildup really is good for Guam. Several weeks ago a new group emerged, Para Hita Todu which is promising to help give voice to the silent majority of Guam people who see the buildup as a good thing. Only time will tell how much they can accomplish, but so far, despite the fact that they represent so much money and power, they are off to a rather silly and almost comical s

The Marianas Variety has a habit lately of putting huge images of people talking on their front page. A few months back, when there was some back and forth debating between JGPO and We Are Guahan at the Rotary Club. The front page of the Variety first had a large, almost poster size image of i matan WAG and my Starcraft 2 bromance buddy Leevin Camacho, in the middle of a word. The week after, they had an image of Colonel Jackson from JGPO, also mid-word. The images weren't that interesting, since it was just people speaking, but the size of them caught me and others off guard. In today's Marianas Variety there was another tall and large frontpage image, yet this time rather than merely representing the act of someone speaking, it was meant to convey deep and serious emotions. The Governor of Guam, Eddie Calvo is standing tall, his hands folded below his waist before him. Rather than the usual images of politicians that we find in the media, which show them staged as happy, bl