A Rolando Carbonel legacy

The very first few words of Rolando Carbonel’s beautiful love poem “Beyond Forgetting” are, to me, the most penetrating expression of man’s deepest emotions about a lost love, longing and the desire to rekindle the flame. Carbonel published the book “Beloved” when I was still in college and “Beyond Forgetting” was among the poems it contained. I cherished listening to him in his Makati office. He said “for a moment, I thought I could forget you”. Then his next two lines also used “for a moment”. There is no doubt that these are very ordinary words, but the way he wrote his opening stanza gave so much depth to his poem that I have been influenced to use it in many of my literary attempts.

For a moment, I thought my call to boycott China was a wild and solitary effort. For a moment, I thought that no Filipino was outraged by the act of Communist Chinese maritime assets using water cannons to drench and almost sink Filipino vessels within the acknowledged Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone. Indeed, for a moment, I thought no Filipino felt violated by the Chinese’ unlawful incursion and immoral occupation of Philippine territorial jurisdiction.

In the depth of my heart, I can still feel, until today, Carbonel’s melancholy in expressing “how wrong I was, for the past, no matter how distant is as much a part of me as life itself.” So let me, for the purpose of this article, borrow his line “how wrong I was”. After I wrote last Thursday’s column “Boycott China, let’s do it now”, I received a plethora of messages asking me to continue explaining to our countrymen the need to stand united against this behemoth of an international law transgressor, in only the economic way we can.

Boycott is the only weapon available to us. One fellow lawyer was emphatic. The counsellor sent me a rather lengthy message the central plot of which said “I WILL NOT BE BUYING CHINESE PRODUCTS”. Others even sounded bitter in asking me to lead a forum where we collect Chinese-made products and burn them. How wrong I was. After all, I was never alone feeling so aggrieved by the blatant criminal acts of these godless communists.

To be truthful, I also got feedbacks claiming that the boycott will bring to our country negative economic impact. Although fewer, there were discernible trolls hiding behind the innocent facades of the more numerous reactors.

Accordingly, China being one of our bigger export markets, our producers will suffer. I have this message to them. That would initially sound convincing. But, that is not factual. That proposition will crumble when facts are shown. The economic data does not lie. We suffer a huge deficit in our China trade. There is an indescribable imbalance against us. The value of Philippine exports to this communist country is not even one fourth of the worth of products we import from China.

If only we can do the improbable act of stopping to buy their goods, China can stop selling anything to us. Then we simply repeat history. We must remember that after Mao Tse Tung’s communist forces seized their government, we stopped all forms of economic trade. The bamboo curtain that China was lived in isolation from all democratic governments. And we survived.