Filipino Voices About To Write #30

Logo, courtesy of Filipino Voices

  

Filipino Voices,  is in disarray if not dead.  What used to be a collective voice of well-minded Filipinos embracing the new media and the digital space is now hobbled on a sickbed about to fold. Nick Cugtas owns the blog and for  a couple of years or three, it has attracted a power-pack writers that have promising potentials and literary erudition.  I have found hard-nosed, incisive and well-meaning writers; Dean Jorge Bocobo, Dean De La Paz, Jeg, Blackshama, Caffeine_Sparks, Benign0, BongV, Lila Shahani, Rom,  and  lawyers, BenCard and Abe Margallo. I  also found The_Cat and Leytenian at times entertaining, and a lot of other  visitors and commentators  who do not fail to put in their five cents worth and snippets of their own genius about the country, her people and the politicians that bled them dry.  As they come with different backgrounds, the debate was often more intense, passionate, eloquent and civil, though sometimes hostile.

Most of the hostilities though came from original participants without literary credentials who mutated to become professional hecklers and half-baked pundits that miserably mistook their ability to punch their keyboard as a badge of entitlement to participate in the forum.  So were some visitors in the likes of Perfecto and Nashman, and  yes JA_G, who think that they have a monopoly of literary gift and probing minds, but the truth is,  their language was atrocious, as well as their prose, logic and perception.  The forum had tried to instill some control, but the control went in one direction. It became one-dimensional, someone enthused; and it had  stifled views that are no longer considered mainstream from the perspective of those who wield the scissors. A prior restraint filtered the grains instead of the chaffs; it was a perfect formula for a mayhem.

Then the heavyweights made a one beeline to the exit,  but the midgets had tarried a while feeling  complete monopoly of the forum that had lose its luster;  and what used to be a vibrant market place of ideas becomes dull – like an inferior specie,  the site has failed to morph into a viable creature in the face of a rapid ecological change; it is about to become extinct, and I am sad that I could not offer the first cypress leave to end its chapter – my hands tremble  wiping away the dewy films in my eyes before they turn into wells.