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Disabusing Second-Class Citizen Label

There is a quiet though common perception in the old homeland that Filipinos immigrating to the US eventually are treated as second-class citizens.

One could easily dismiss this as part of an old-wives tale with not much basis in fact, since speaking of current laws and practices there is nothing to suggest that tiers of citizenship are practiced in the US.

A second-class citizen may be generally defined as an informal term used to describe a person, being a member of a discriminated group, who is systematically discriminated against within a state or other political jurisdiction.

But are there so-called second-class citizens in the US? Or do certain Americans treat others as second-class citizens?

I would have no hesitation answering in the affirmative to both questions.

Now, there is continuing discrimination in the US and there are no two ways about that, but it definitely is not state-countenanced nor is it legally embodied in any existing laws. But people being people and man’s innate inability to legislate on what people can or cannot think, certain isolated discriminatory practices continue and will continue to be practiced. But happily, there are many watchdog groups, private and governmental, tasked specifically with making sure that these undesirable practices are not allowed to prosper or fester. And the body politic has been so acutely sensitized about discrimination that it has not been allowed to rear its ugly in public for longer than the speedy haste that vigilant people can denounce it.

So that being set aside, why do many of my compatriots in the old homeland continue to spout the bromide that Filipinos become second-class citizens in the US?

Just the other day, surfing and scanning through a blog authored by a rather intelligent and perceptive young man, deep into political activism, I again ran across this inference, this time that his migrant parents in the US are treated as second-class citizens. And with no provision of any proof for such a damning charge, maybe other than that the parents may consider themselves second-class citizens.

Knowing Filipinos and of course, being one myself, let me advance a couple of possible plausible reasons why migrant Filipinos may have on their own consigned themselves to second-class citizen category.

First and foremost, many Filipinos are not wont to barter away their packaged cultural, social, and personal identities even when they find themselves in strange new places. There appears an almost implacable resistance to part with any trait or quality acquired in the old homeland, in order to begin the process of assimilation or integration in the major culture of the new host country. While a good part of it may be adamant resistance, I suspect unchecked cluelessness, or even misplaced nationalism, may also be thrown into the mix. The lack of dispassionate awareness that certain ways of thinking and acting will have to be exchanged so not only can at least a modicum of social acceptance be had, but importantly so one can be part of and participate in mainstream society and thus avail of the inherent benefits accorded it. Such critical benefits as educational and employment opportunities. Or simply, social acceptance.

Full citizenship does require one to integrate at least, if not assimilate, with the rest of society. And in the US, the presence of many cultural minorities notwithstanding, everybody knows what the majority culture still is, representing almost 70% of the population.

Another thorny issue that may drive Filipinos to count themselves as second-class citizens may even be considered baseless or unfounded. And may simply be a form of cop-out. Many Filipinos come into the US holding temporary or visitor’s visa. They look for and find work, circumventing laws and/or contravening provisions of their visa. Then, they prolong their stay way beyond the expiration of their visa and thus become overstaying illegals, armed with and encouraged by the firm hope that their extended stay could be parlayed into legal status in the future, with able assistance from the number of immigration lawyers willing to handle their case.

In the meantime, their numbers stealthily operate in the shadows of the underground economy, unable to participate and avail of all the benefits available to those of legal status or those here in the country with visas valid for regular employment. And truly, they become second-class, but not even as second-class citizens because they are not.

In this second instance, while this intrepid and most-times selfless measure resorted to, done all for family and loved ones, should be admired, it is still first and foremost an illegal way.

And rightfully, nobody in this situation can have any expectations other than those of second-class status.

Of Hand Mowers And Grass-cutters

Blogfather Glenn Reynolds had this to say about hand-powered mowers and grass-cutters:

Still, the unpowered reel mower that they test -- it's very similar to the one that I own -- gets high marks:

This archaic, human-powered technology still has its strengths. At a run, it was faster than the walk-behind mower. It was the most maneuverable and lightest machine, and the easiest to store in a crowded garage. The sweat level was high, but it scored well on moral superiority: No emissions, little noise, and the only fuel to buy was Gatorade. Big complaint: It rolls over weeds without cutting them — a real drawback at my place.

That is the main drawback, one that I deal with by using one of these. Another advantage of the unpowered mower is that you can start your kids mowing with them earlier -- my daughter mowed her first lawn at the age of 9. And the PopMech advice to wear earplugs when using any kind of power mower is good advice -- I've done that since I was a teenager (also for live music and shooting), and my hearing remains surprisingly good.

And I use exactly the same kind of tools, a hand-powered mower ably assisted by an electric grass-cutter or weed-whacker. Long extension cord recommended.

And I see absolutely no-drawbacks, all beneficial results. Since I jog regularly, what better exercise for one’s upper body than mowing your lawn – this way.

And economic benefits, too. Got this mower over 15 years ago and the grass-cutter, a relatively new addition, about 3 years since the previous one got retired. The old one was commissioned many times for hard-labor duties, cutting over-grown weeds and small brushes. Still that one loyally served for over 20 years.

The Man In Black: Spidey

The 3rd sequel of Spiderman is out and promises to be another summer blockbuster as were the previous two. Or is it a prequel?

Something different has been introduced. Spidey in a black foreboding costume.

Nothing new. For serious Spidey comic book enthusiasts.

Click to read more.

Are You Taken Over By The Internet?

The McPaper of the US, USA Today, has started a “book of lists” series to celebrate its quarter-century existence.

The latest and the sixth is entitled How the Internet Took Over.

For us, consumers/proponents/devotees of the Internet, it might be entertaining to slither through memory lane, just on a 25-year span, to relate with nostalgia how the 25 items on the list personally touched and affected us on a personal basis.

Twenty-five years ago the Internet as we now know it was in the process of being birthed by the National Science Foundation. Since then it's been an information explosion. From e-mail to eBay, communication and shopping have forever changed.

So, let’s start with No. 1.

1 World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee created user-friendly “Web pages” that could travel over the Internet, a network built to shuttle research between universities. The world logged on: 747 million adults in January.

The ubiquitous 3 Ws in each URL we had to type constantly reminded us that we were accessing and becoming part of that Web. But that didn’t preclude our puzzlement over how to distinguish it from the Internet that some had grown accustomed to. It was initially quite difficult to create a mental image of the differences between the web and the Internet, even after consulting their respective definitions.

In review, we present their differentiating definitions:

The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols. It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

A hypermedia-based system for browsing Internet sites. It is named the Web because it is made of many sites linked together; users can travel from one site to another by clicking on hyperlinks. Or "The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." - Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Are we clear now?

2 E-mail
Tech’s answer to the Pony Express. Programs such as 1988’s Eudora made it easy to use. In-boxes have been filling up ever since. Nearly 97 billion e-mails are sent each day.

E-mail gave us the term, snail mail. Just a little pejorative to drive deeper the world of difference between the former with other forms of traditional mail – whether through the postal system, or those private mailing companies like UPS and FedEx. Mail through the speed of light is now our standard measure for efficiency and effectiveness of our communications.

Never got to install Eudora, since I started with the Netscape Navigator email client, which came and gained fame before MS Outlook. When Internet Explorer got bundled with MS Windows operating system, starting with the 95 version, that too signaled the demise of Netscape and its other services. Although the “bundling” got Microsoft back to the courts and into a number of litigation against it. Nevertheless, Internet Explorer was well on its way to its unchallenged monopoly, that is until recently when open-source FireFox threw down its gauntlet for a mighty challenge.

Anyway, back to email.

Now, many users are partial to web-based email services which can be accessed from anywhere internet access can be had.

Can any Internet or Web user now live without one, whether web-based or computer-resident?

3 Graphical user interface (GUI)
Most computer displays were blinking lines of text until Apple featured clickable icons and other graphic tools in its 1984 Mac. Microsoft’s Windows took GUI — pronounced “gooey” — to the masses.

I can remember Apple’s Macintosh proudly display its initial version of GUI, still quite coarse and very low resolution. We can also remember how Windows beat Apple to the draw in capitalizing on GUI, clearly sealing the defeat with the introduction of Windows 95 in 1995. This heavy loss most probably drove Apple to the courts to seek redress, claiming it had prior proprietary rights to graphical interface. No such luck, since the courts ruled against Apple after some years passed. Now GUI is so commonplace that most users now suffer selective amnesia when asked what came before it.

4 AOL
AOL turned people on to Web portals, chat rooms and instant messaging. Early subscribers paid by the hour. AOL once boasted 35 million subscribers. It bought Time Warner for $106 billion in 2001.

AOL blazed through the entire web, decimating whatever competition was already extant. It became the ISP to be a member of. And Steve Case of AOL became the darling of consumer technology enabling AOL to gobble up giant Time Warner.

Say, whatever happened to Steve Case and how is AOL doing?

5 Broadband
The answer to the drip-drip-drip of dial-up, high-speed Internet service fuels online entertainment. About 78% of home Internet users in the U.S. have broadband, up from less than 1% in 1998.

Yes, broad against narrow band of dial-up. Yet even during the drip-drip-drip period of AOL, I shied away and consorted with the “freebies”, starting with Bigger.net and then moving on to Netzero.net before it became for-pay. With Bigger.net and Netzero.net one simply allowed ad sponsors clutter to colonize one’s monitor screen to get free access.

In a couple of years Bigger.net went kaput to be replaced by Netzero.net. The latter has survived to this day but subscription is now for pay. Still cheaper compared to AOL.

Broadband now comes in different flavors – DSL, cable, or satellite/wireless/microwave, and even using your home electric wiring system.

6 Google
So popular it’s a verb. The search powerhouse, with a market capitalization of nearly $149 billion, perfected how we find info on the Web. Google sites had nearly 500 million visitors in December.

What more can one say about Google. The search engine of search engines.

And who were the precursor webcrawlers?

7 Mosaic/Netscape
Created by Marc Andreessen and others, Mosaic was the first widely-used multimedia Web browser. Spin-off Netscape Navigator ruled the ‘90s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took off around ‘98.

I still have somewhere the earliest version of Netscape Navigator stored on floppy disks. Numbering 2 or 3 maybe, each holding 1.44Mb of data? But remember during those times, the entire Windows 95 suite resided on 12 floppy disks.

8 eBay
Thanks to eBay, we can all now buy and sell almost anything (skip the body parts). eBay has 230 million customers worldwide who engage in 100 million auctions at any given time.

And who has not gone through the eBay site, either to browse or purchase, and if the latter, kept coming back to find out how your bid(s) did? I still maintain an inactive account since I haven’t purchased any lately. I was for a while quite active on obscure rival, uBid, though.

9 Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos’ baby began as an always-in-stock book seller. It survived the tech bubble and now is the definitive big box online store. It was the second most-visited online retailer in December, after eBay.

Any book buyer worth his salt must have gone through Amazon. And of course, those who write and publish books. But still a funny name for a company selling essentially books and other publications.

10 Wi-Fi
Have coffee shop, will compute: Wireless fidelity lets us lug our laptops out of the office and connect to the Net on the fly. More than 200 million Wi-Fi equipped products sold last year.

For many years, Ethernet was the buzz word for wired networking with its bulkier and more robust wiring, which was double that of your ordinary phone line. Cat5(Category 5), then Cat6, were the standards for PCs connecting to the network, and eventually to the Internet/WWW. And we thought that further future development was heading and winding in that direction, until wireless reared its head and made the wired network connection go limp for many.

Whatever happened to Gigabit Ethernet?

11 Instant Messaging
LOL! Web surfers began to “laugh out loud” and BRB (“be right back”) in the mid-‘90s, with the launch of ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Millions use it to swap messages and photos, even telephone pals.

Was never a devotee of IM, but I could decently frame and send SMS, which is very popular in the old homeland since it is quite cheap, sometimes even free, to send and receive text messages.

12 Yahoo!
Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created this popular Web portal in 1994. It remains a favorite for email, photo sharing (it owns Flickr) and other services.

Okay, so I use Yahoo!Groups where I participate in at least a dozen email lists, being a moderator in at least one. But Iwon continues to be my home portal, with a customized MyIwon page. One good reason? Using it gives one the opportunity to win various cash prizes, and great items, too.

(To be continued.)