S.O.S @ix.luna.m 4 days ago and without me having to say much.. She gave me the guidance and affirmations i badly needed.. 😭 And the cards that came out with the messages from divine sources really spoke to me and spoke through me.. Until i cry wth 😂🙈

It has been easy the last one month with 3 kids and Josh falling sick.. The whole 2 weeks was insane. Work load was insane. Each kid see doc x 2-3 times.. The fees also crazy. Plus all the late payment from some projects and i'm just like.. 🌪⛈🌫 The gloom was so real.

Day in day out mood swing damn jialat, at night just force myself to clear more more more work on computer. I refuse to accept that if i try my hardest, i can't break out of this bad cycle i always find myself back in. I do not accept. So much self-disappointment, anger and indignity 🤯 So much feeling of a failure as a parent who is not able to give my kids security blanket.. In my head it feels like a hot mess constantly ☠️

It's like i forgot who i am, what i'm blessed with..

I didn't tell her anything but then @ix.luna.m reach out and ask if she can help me. And i'm happy i open up becox she truly help me see light ❤️☀️🌤 Thank you @ix.luna.m ❤️

For those who are looking for spiritual counselling and guidance, please read @ix.luna.m bio info before emailing.. I am truly blessed by this gifted being and i'm lucky to be friends with her ❤️

Since the reading and affirmations i've felt like a HUGE rock off my chest.. Like someone understands without me having to explain all the many little thoughts driving me insane 🤡😂

A GOOD READ from one of the greatest leader that lived, #SINGAPORE's founding man, #LeeKuanYew

THIS MUST BE SHARED AND THOROUGHLY READ BY EVERY FILIPINO... Its quite long but it will surely strengthen our minds but then at the end, I was like "SAYANG!!!"
It came from the SINGAPORE'S FOUNDING MAN ITSELF, former Prime Minister LEE KUAN YEW on how the Philippines should have become, IF ONLY...

I've just read it and, its point blank!
Its a good read
____________

(The following excerpt is taken from pages 299 – 305 from Lee Kuan Yew’s book “From Third World to First”, Chapter 18 “Building Ties with Thailand, the Philippines, and Brunei”)

*

The Philippines was a world apart from us, running a different style of politics and government under an American military umbrella. It was not until January 1974 that I visited President Marcos in Manila. When my Singapore Airlines plane flew into Philippine airspace, a small squadron of Philippine Air Force jet fighters escorted it to Manila Airport. There Marcos received me in great style – the Filipino way. I was put up at the guest wing of Malacañang Palace in lavishly furnished rooms, valuable objects of art bought in Europe strewn all over. Our hosts were gracious, extravagant in hospitality, flamboyant. Over a thousand miles of water separated us. There was no friction and little trade. We played golf, talked about the future of ASEAN, and promised to keep in touch.

His foreign minister, Carlos P. Romulo, was a small man of about five feet some 20 years my senior, with a ready wit and a self-deprecating manner about his size and other limitations. Romulo had a good sense of humor, an eloquent tongue, and a sharp pen, and was an excellent dinner companion because he was a wonderful raconteur, with a vast repertoire of anecdotes and witticisms. He did not hide his great admiration for the Americans. One of his favourite stories was about his return to the Philippines with General MacArthur. As MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte, the water reached his knees but came up to Romulo’s chest and he had to swim ashore. His good standing with ASEAN leaders and with Americans increased the prestige of the Marcos administration. Marcos had in Romulo a man of honor and integrity who helped give a gloss of respectability to his regime as it fell into disrepute in the 1980s.

In Bali in 1976, at the first ASEAN summit held after the fall of Saigon, I found Marcos keen to push for greater economic cooperation in ASEAN. But we could not go faster than the others. To set the pace, Marcos and I agreed to implement a bilateral Philippines-Singapore across-the-board 10 percent reduction of existing tariffs on all products and to promote intra-ASEAN trade. We also agreed to lay a Philippines-Singapore submarine cable. I was to discover that for him, the communiqué was the accomplishment itself; its implementation was secondary, an extra to be discussed at another conference.

We met every two to three years. He once took me on a tour of his library at Malacañang, its shelves filled with bound volumes of newspapers reporting his activities over the years since he first stood for elections. There were encyclopedia-size volumes on the history and culture of the Philippines with his name as the author. His campaign medals as an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader were displayed in glass cupboards. He was the undisputed boss of all Filipinos. Imelda, his wife, had a penchant for luxury and opulence. When they visited Singapore before the Bali summit they came in stye in two DC8’s, his and hers.

Marcos did not consider China a threat for the immediate future, unlike Japan. He did not rule out the possibility of an aggressive Japan, if circumstances changed. He had memories of the horrors the Imperial Army had inflicted on Manila. We had strongly divergent views on the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia. While he, pro forma, condemned the Vietnamese occupation, he did not consider it a danger to the Philippines. There was the South China Sea separating them and the American navy guaranteed their security. As a result, Marcos was not active on the Cambodian question. Moreover, he was to become preoccupied with the deteriorating security in his country.

Marcos, ruling under martial law, had detained opposition leader Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, reputed to be as charismatic and powerful a campaigner as he was. He freed Aquino and allowed him to go to the United States. As the economic situation in the Philippines deteriorated, Aquino announced his decision to return. Mrs. Marcos issued several veiled warnings. When the plane arrived at Manila Airport from Taipei in August 1983, he was shot as he descended from the aircraft. A whole posse of foreign correspondents with television camera crews accompanying him on the aircraft was not enough protection.

International outrage over the killing resulted in foreign banks stopping all loans to the Philippines, which owed over US$25 billion and could not pay the interest due. This brought Marcos to the crunch. He sent his minister for trade and industry, Bobby Ongpin, to ask me for a loan of US$300-500 million to meet the interest payments. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “We will never see that money back.” Moreover, I added, everyone knew that Marcos was seriously ill and under constant medication for a wasting disease. What was needed was a strong, healthy leader, not more loans.

Shortly afterward, in February 1984, Marcos met me in Brunei at the sultanate’s independence celebrations. He had undergone a dramatic physical change. Although less puffy than he had appeared on television, his complexion was dark as if he had been out in the sun. He was breathing hard as he spoke, his voice was soft, eyes bleary, and hair thinning. He looked most unhealthy. An ambulance with all the necessary equipment and a team of Filipino doctors were on standby outside his guest bungalow. Marcos spent much of the time giving me a most improbable story of how Aquino had been shot.

As soon as all our aides left, I went straight to the point, that no bank was going to lend him any money. They wanted to know who was going to succeed him if anything were to happen to him; all the bankers could see that he no longer looked healthy. Singapore banks had lent US$8 billion of the US$25 billion owing. The hard fact was they were not likely to get repayment for some 20 years. He countered that it would be only eight years. I said the bankers wanted to see a strong leader in the Philippines who could restore stability, and the Americans hoped the election in May would throw up someone who could be such a leader. I asked whom he would nominate for the election. He said Prime Minister Cesar Virata. I was blunt. Virata was a nonstarter, a first-class administrator but no political leader; further, his most politically astute colleague, defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile, was out of favour. Marcos was silent, then he admitted that succession was the nub of the problem. If he could find a successor, there would be a solution. As I left, he said, “You are a true friend.” I did not understand him. It was a strange meeting.

With medical care, Marcos dragged on. Cesar Virata met me in Singapore in January the following year. He was completely guileless, a political innocent. He said that Mrs. Imelda Marcos was likely to be nominated as the presidential candidate. I asked how that could be when there were other weighty candidates, including Juan Ponce Enrile and Blas Ople, the labor minister. Virata replied it had to do with “flow of money; she would have more money than other candidates to pay for the votes needed for nomination by the party and to win the election. He added that if she were the candidate, the opposition would put up Mrs. Cory Aquino and work up the people’s feelings. He said the economy was going down with no political stability.

The denouement came in February 1986 when Marcos held presidential elections which he claimed he won. Cory Aquino, the opposition candidate, disputed this and launched a civil disobedience campaign. Defense Minister Juan Enrile defected and admitted election fraud had taken place, and the head of the Philippine constabulary, Lieutenant General Fidel Ramos, joined him. A massive show of “people power” in the streets of Manila led to a spectacular overthrow of a dictatorship. The final indignity was on 25 February 1986, when Marcos and his wife fled in U.S. Air Force helicopters from Malacañang Palace to Clark Air Base and were flown to Hawaii. This Hollywood-style melodrama could only have happened in the Philippines.

Mrs. Aquino was sworn in as president amid jubilation. I had hopes that this honest, God-fearing woman would help regain confidence for the Philippines and get the country back on track. I visited her that June, three months after the event. She was a sincere, devout Catholic who wanted to do her best for her country by carrying out what she believed her husband would have done had he been alive, namely, restore democracy to the Philippines. Democracy would then solve their economic and social problems. At dinner, Mrs. Aquino seated the chairman of the constitutional commission, Chief Justice Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, next to me. I asked the learned lady what lessons her commission had learned from the experience of the last 40 years since independence in 1946 would guide her in drafting the constitution. She answered without hesitation, “We will not have any reservations or limitations on our democracy. We must make sure that no dictator can ever emerge to subvert the constitution.” Was there no incompatibility of the American-type separation of powers with the culture and habits of the Filipino people that had caused problems for the presidents before Marcos? Apparently none.

Endless attempted coups added to Mrs. Aquino’s problems. The army and the constabulary had been politicized. Before the ASEAN summit in December 1987, a coup was threatened. Without President Suharto’s firm support the summit would have been postponed and confidence in Aquino’s government undermined. The Philippine government agreed that the responsibility for security should be shared between them and the other ASEAN governments, in particular the Indonesian government. General Benny Moerdani, President Suharto’s trusted aide, took charge. He positioned an Indonesian warship in the middle of Manila Bay with helicopters and a commando team ready to rescue the ASEAN heads of government if there should be a coup attempt during the summit. I was included in their rescue plans. I wondered if such a rescue could work but decided to go along with the arrangements, hoping that the show of force would scare off the coup leaders. We were all confined to the Philippine Plaza Hotel by the seafront facing Manila Bay where we could see the Indonesian warship at anchor. The hotel was completely sealed off and guarded. The summit went off without any mishap. We all hoped that this show of united support for Mrs. Aquino’s government at a time when there were many attempts to destabilize it would calm the situation.

It made no difference. There were more coup attempts, discouraging investments badly needed to create jobs. This was a pity because they had so many able people, educated in the Philippines and the United States. Their workers were English-speaking, at least in Manila. There was no reason why the Philippines should not have been one of the more successful of the ASEAN countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the most developed, because America had been generous in rehabilitating the country after the war. Something was missing, a gel to hold society together. The people at the top, the elite mestizos, had the same detached attitude to the native peasants as the mestizos in their haciendas in Latin America had toward their peons. They were two different societies: Those at the top lived a life of extreme luxury and comfort while the peasants scraped a living, and in the Philippines it was a hard living. They had no land but worked on sugar and coconut plantations.They had many children because the church discouraged birth control. The result was increasing poverty.

It was obvious that the Philippines would never take off unless there was substantial aid from the United States. George Shultz, the secretary of state, was sympathetic and wanted to help but made clear to me that the United States would be better able to do something if ASEAN showed support by making its contribution. The United States was reluctant to go it alone and adopt the Philippines as its special problem. Shultz wanted ASEAN to play a more prominent role to make it easier for the president to get the necessary votes in Congress. I persuaded Shultz to get the aid project off the ground in 1988, before President Reagan’s second term of office ended. He did. There were two meetings for a Multilateral Assistance Initiative (Philippines Assistance Programme): The first in Tokyo in 1989 brought US$3.5 billion in pledges, and the second in Hong Kong in 1991, under the Bush administration, yielded US$14 billion in pledges. But instability in the Philippines did not abate. This made donors hesitant and delayed the implementation of projects.

Mrs. Aquino’s successor, Fidel Ramos, whom she had backed, was more practical and established greater stability. In November 1992, I visited him. In a speech to the 18th Philippine Business Conference, I said, “I do not believe democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.” In private, President Ramos said he agreed with me that British parliamentary-type constitutions worked better because the majority party in the legislature was also the government. Publicly, Ramos had to differ.

He knew well the difficulties of trying to govern with strict American-style separation of powers. The senate had already defeated Mrs. Aquino’s proposal to retain the American bases. The Philippines had a rambunctious press but it did not check corruption. Individual press reporters could be bought, as could many judges. Something had gone seriously wrong. Millions of Filipino men and women had to leave their country for jobs abroad beneath their level of education. Filipino professionals whom we recruited to work in Singapore are as good as our own. Indeed, their architects, artists, and musicians are more artistic and creative than ours. Hundreds of thousands of them have left for Hawaii and for the American mainland. It is a problem the solution to which has not been made easier by the workings of a Philippine version of the American constitution.

The difference lies in the culture of the Filipino people. It is a soft, forgiving culture. Only in the Philippines could a leader like Ferdinand Marcos, who pillaged his country for over 20 years, still be considered for a national burial. Insignificant amounts of the loot have been recovered, yet his wife and children were allowed to return and engage in politics. They supported the winning presidential and congressional candidates with their considerable resources and reappeared in the political and social limelight after the 1998 election that returned President Joseph Estrada. General Fabian Ver, Marcos’s commander-in-chief who had been in charge of security when Aquino was assassinated, had fled the Philippines together with Marcos in 1986. When he died in Bangkok, the Estrada government gave the general military honors at his burial. One Filipino newspaper, Today, wrote on 22 November 1998, “Ver, Marcos and the rest of the official family plunged the country into two decades of lies, torture, and plunder. Over the next decade, Marcos’s cronies and immediate family would tiptoe back into the country, one by one – always to the public’s revulsion and disgust, though they showed that there was nothing that hidden money and thick hides could not withstand.” Some Filipinos write and speak with passion. If they could get their elite to share their sentiments and act, what could they not have achieved?

-----

SAYANG! kindly share.

The global outbreak of novel coronavirus has shaken up the world and many of us are being forced to let go of the life we are familiar with. Those who are infected with the virus were first treated as victims, but now they are considered as victimizers, a threat to others, and are feeling unnecessary indignity and distress in the process.

Not knowing who is infected, including ourselves, creates and spreads fears that lead to bigotry and discrimination pitting one community or one nation against the other. Fears that the whole nation may be put in a state of chaos and paralysis are causing all sorts of social disruptions such as hoarding facial masks and other supplies or the rise in racist sentiment including hurling abuses and refusing entry to restaurants and public facilities. Fear, hatred, and cruelty of human beings seem more terrifying than the virus itself. That is why I strongly believe that it is necessary to remain calm, get facts right, and reach out and help each other.

We and the supporters in China discussed and decided to create a song for Chinese people living in anxiety and fear, and I immediately started to work on a piece, hoping to help in whatever way possible. The work is now finished and we decided to distribute it for free in China. And this music and video is now available for streaming in other countries as well.

In the process of creating this piece of music I recognize that this is a song for not only Chinese people but also Japanese and all the people around the world who are fighting the threat of COVID-19.

There is only so much what music can do, but I believe that many of us find solace in music. As I wrote in the lyrics to this song, I truly hope that when the outbreak winds down and normalcy is restored even if we are not totally unscathed, we will be able to laugh about it with our families and friends. Until then, we are going to hang in there.


Yojiro



世界的な流行をみせる新型コロナウィルスの流行にともない、多くの人が普段とは違う生活を強いられています。本来「被害者」であるはずの感染者は、いつのまにか「加害者」へと見られ方を変え窮屈な想いをしながら日々を生活しています。どこに感染者がいるか分からない、自分が感染しているかもしれないという恐怖が伝播し、それは地域単位、国単位の差別的な偏見をも助長させます。社会機能の麻痺や混乱が来る恐れから、あらゆる歪みも生じてきています。マスク、生活用品の買い占め、特定の人種への迫害、心ない言葉、飲食店や公共施設などへの立ち入り拒否。ウィルスよりも恐ろしいのは人間の恐怖心や憎悪、冷酷さなのかもしれません。こんな時こそ冷静な判断、情報収集、そして手を取り合う心が必要なのではと強く感じます。
　今回、中国でお世話になっている方々から「中国で不安な生活を送る人たちを励ます曲を作ってはもらえませんか」と提案を受けました。ぜひ力になれるのならばと、急いで楽曲の制作に入りました。そして今回完成にこぎつけることができ、無料で中国内の皆さんへ配信することを決めました。
　曲を作りながら、これは中国の方に向けたものであると同時に日本、そして世界中でウィルスの脅威と闘うすべての人に向けた曲だと感じました。そして今回、他の国々でのストリーミングと映像の公開もできることになりました。
　音楽にできることはとても小さいです。でも時にその小ささに救われることもあるのではと、僕は思っています。歌詞の中でも書きました。この事態が無事終息し、無傷ではなくとも平穏な日々が戻ってきた時には「あの時は本当どうなるかと思ったね」と笑いながら皆大事な家族や友と話ができたらいいなと心から願っています。その時まで、皆で頑張り抜きたいです。


洋次郎





■Lyrics
English
https://radwimps.jp/lightthelight/lyrics/en/
Japanese
https://radwimps.jp/lightthelight/lyrics/
Chinese
https://radwimps.jp/lightthelight/lyrics/cn/

■Music streaming
https://linkco.re/1ErEycQ1




Alive Painting : Akiko Nakayama

Director : Daisuke Shimada
Assistant Director : Mizuki Jin
Cinematographer : Yuki Nakamura（Gonshiro）
D.I.T : Yosuke Tominaga（Gonshiro）
Lighting : Osamu Yamamori
Producer : Koji Takayama