Thou shalt not kill … our language!

We know very little of this fellow Warren Buffet, except that he plays second fiddle to Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame) in vying for the title of world’s richest man, according to Forbes magazine. But last Tuesday, the attention of the whole world focused on Mr. Buffet when he declared that he would be giving away 85 percent of his wealth to the charity foundation being run by the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda.

All told, that’s a whopping $37 billion big buckaroos from his supposedly $44 billion wealth! If you ask me… this is the biggest money I have ever heard that has been given to charity. Not even a rich country has given away so much for charity. This very Christian act by Warren Buffet should shame the ultra-rich oil sheiks or oil barons. I’m sure that with this news there’s going to be a long beeline to the door of Bill and Melinda Gates with palms open, hoping to get a drop from the Buffet donation.

But while Mr. Buffet has given away 85 percent of his fortune, it doesn’t turn him into a pauper. He still has a few billions stashed away in his banks either in cash, stocks or properties. I don’t know what went into Mr. Buffet’s head and why he did this very dramatic donation… no doubt, he knows too well that much-repeated phrase… "You can’t take it with you!"

I can’t forget the homily of Fr. Benedict Groeschel of New York City during his show at the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) aired on All Soul’s Day where he pointed out clearly, in no uncertain terms, that when our time is up on this earth, no matter how rich we are or how many friends we have, when our souls leave our bodies… our money and our friends can’t do anything and the only thing that we bring with us… is our trust in the Mercy of Jesus Christ. If we cannot even bring that trust in Jesus… then we bring nothing with us to our life in eternity!

Perhaps Warren Buffet has also realized what happened to the estate of the world’s richest man in the 60s… the famous Howard Hughes, who left no heir and his fortune was scattered into bits and pieces, most of them landing in the pockets or bank accounts of his lawyers. Well, for sure, this is not what will happen to the fortune of Mr. Buffet, and with his money in the safe hands of Bill Gates, I’m sure that the poor people of this world would certainly benefit from his great philanthropic act. May God bless people like Mr. Buffet.

Lest we failed to notice, we too have our own philanthropists here. While he is no Warren Buffet, allow me to say though that former Congressman Mark Jimenez, in his own small way, has also done the same for the poor… in this case, those people who had lost their money because the pre-need companies where they had invested their money failed to service their clients.

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That the Philippines has joined the rest of the civilized world in throwing away capital punishment a.k.a. death penalty is something that even the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has welcomed with delight, and supposedly, we are on our way to reverse the Culture of Death into a Culture of Life. Of course, we know that not everyone is happy with this development, but in the end… this move is for all to have a better country.

However, while we have done a lot to reverse this culture of killing into a culture of life, allow me to interject the need for this country to start respecting the cultures of other ethnic groups. I’ve already written about this many times before, that our group called Save Our Languages Through Federalism Foundation Inc. (SOLFED) believes in the dictum put forward by Prof. Kenneth Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "When you lose a language you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art."

How does an ethnic group lose their language? It is when only the language of one ethnic group is being forced upon the rest of the country… that’s exactly what is happening today when Tagalog nationalists promote only Tagalog nationalism. We call them Tagalog colonizers! Mind you, thou shalt not kill also means… thou shalt not kill a people and render their culture extinct! Indeed, Tagalog nationalists insist on Tagalog (which they not-so-cleverly changed to Pilipino) as the national language of this country to the utter destruction of the other spoken languages of this archipelago.

Hence, we believe that if you suppress the spoken language of one ethnic group… you are taking away their human right to speak the tongue that they were born in. In America, the last speaker of the language of the Choctaw, a Native American tribe, was able to write down his language and thus, was able to save it from extinction! But there are many other endangered languages like the Arapaho, the Comanche, the Pawnee and the Crow that need to be saved from extinction. Here, Butuanon is nearly extinct!

This is why this country has yet to achieve a modicum of national unity… a unity that we can readily see in the Philippine flag where all the major island groups are represented by the stars… but alas, this is not so with our National Anthem, which by law should only be sung supposedly in Pilipino, which you know is 99.9 percent Tagalog. Hence for all intents and purposes, the Pilipino that is supposedly spoken today is actually a dialect of the Tagalog language.

I’m a full-blooded Cebuano born of Cebuano parents and I will be celebrating my 20 years as a journalist, yet I cannot write in our Cebuano language simply because Cebuano wasn’t taught in high school and I had to learn two foreign languages…. English and Tagalog! Thus I have become a second-class citizen in my own native land! I’m not alone in my way of thinking… I’m sure many Ilonggos, Ilocanos, Capampangans, Bicolanos or Warays feel very much the same way as we Cebuanos do.

Take the case of the Ilonggos… if you didn’t know, the Ilonggo nation of Western Visayas existed from 1214 up to the early 1900s. It had a separate and distinct political system, its own culture, ethnic languages and traditions, history and aspirations. The Ilonggos are undoubtedly a proud race, and do you think they like the present system of government? Think again! There is such a thing as the "Ilonggo Nation Movement," something that we shall write about in our future columns. How about a Cebu Nation Movement?

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns in The Freeman can also be accessed through The Philippine STAR website. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.