David Haldane, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer, is an award-winning American journalist, author and broadcaster. He has homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Surigao City, Philippines, where he lives with his Filipino wife and their two children.
97 stories
“We care deeply about all our employees,” the interim superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District declared last week after firing nearly 500 of them. The reason: they had missed the district’s deadline for mandatory COVID vaccinations. The result: a shortage of teachers that could force some classes back online.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that every Filipino healthcare worker imported to the US means one less working in the Philippines.
That impression got reinforced last week during a seven-day sojourn to Mexico’s seaside resort town of Mazatlan. “Wow,” I heard myself thinking in a strange, reverse déjà vu, “this is the Philippines of North America.”
In the end, though, the sensations grew too scary. I’d become convinced that someone was chasing me while driving stoned down the Hollywood Freeway. Or imagine reading the minds of those who I supposed would kill me if they could.
But there’s another reason I feel connected to him, and it has to do with history. Madlos was exactly my age, 72, so it’s a good bet that his radicalization as a young man in Mindanao occurred about the same time mine happened in New York City. I joined a Marxist group called the Young Socialist Alliance to work as a political organizer. And, though I never took part in revolutionary violence or got arrested like him, I certainly believed in the overthrow of global capitalism.
The salutes. The proud words of praise. The dual bugles playing reverie; the gently bellowed national anthems; the prayers of reverence and gratitude.
One of his favorites is about a wise master and his intelligent disciple. The disciple wants to test the master, so one day he catches a bird small enough to fit in the palms of both hands. Covering the animal so the master can’t see, he asks whether it is dead or alive. If the master says the bird is dead, the disciple reasons, he will open his hands to release it, proving the master wrong. If he says it’s alive, the disciple will crush the bird to death, once again proving the master wrong. The master pauses briefly before replying. “The answer,” he finally says, “lies in your hands.”
Activist journalism isn’t new, of course. Back in the early 1970s, I began my career at a Northern California weekly called the Berkeley BARB, a notorious player in what was then referred to as America’s leftist “underground press.”
Directly behind her sat Mom and Dad; she beaming proudly and holding a flower while he stared painfully in a stiffly ironed barong. Front-and-center, clutched close to her bosom where one might expect a rose, Maryneil Guarte, the soon-to-be new wife, held tightly onto… wait… a cell phone?
Britney Spears, long-time global singing idol, is finally free of her father’s controlling clutches. And on Nov. 12, we’re told, a Los Angeles judge will decide whether to forever end the conservatorship that has enslaved her for years.
His name is Jose Antonio Vargas; a Filipino by birth, but American by choice. For most of his life, the 40-year-old immigrant has lived illegally in the United States. Others, in similar circumstances, do their best to keep that status secret. But Vargas has made a career of openly flouting US immigration law. And, instead of enforcing it, his adopted country has rewarded this migrant scofflaw with money, fame, and professional acclaim. Meet the man frequently referred to as America’s “public face of undocumented immigrants.”
I am friendly by nature. And, perhaps more to the point, have an intuitive curiosity honed by years of practicing journalism.