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Filipina Soul

Jose Rizal: In Focus

by admin on March 20th, 2006

Noli Me Tangere (Shaps Library of Translations)Who doesn’t know Dr. Jose Rizal, the Philippines’ National Hero? 

I briefly mentioned this guy in a post last year. While I truly admire his famous books “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo” (we are forced to read these two books cover to cover back in high school!) , I have question marks floating in my head with regards to his real personality and objectives in all the things that he did during his time, especially his cry for reform with the Spanish government.

Well, we could only speculate based on what was written about him. It was already given that he is an exceptionally talented Filipino of his time but i think he was just lucky to be born into a family who can afford to send him to Europe to study. I feel too that he failed to do something important to turn his country around.

Anyway, a young Filipino lawyer (in his blog) has quite some interesting stuff said about Jose Rizal. In his entry entitled  The Elitist Rizal In Us, I’ve highlighted the paragraph that i like most:

rizal therefore had this solid reliance on intelligence, like it was all about the brains and nothing else. and i feel very bad that we see it that way when we study rizal in school. in a very agricultural country like ours, we unanimously believe that first and foremost, we should send all the younger people to college, regardless of his level of intelligence, beacuse life favors those who are well educated. again, i am not tracing this to rizal, but i believe that he has something to do with the overabundance of college graduates in this country, which is not a good thing, because less and less people become farmers, fishermen and carpenters.

While in his post, The Ignorant Rizal In Us, below is the part I like the most:

rizal was an irresponsible brat - his time’s equivalent to the present-day coño kids. he went to europe to study medicine but he never finished his course, and instead he travelled around europe and had an eyeball with hid long-time penpal ferdinand blumentritt. he spoke german, spanish, latin, some french, and some greek, and our historians made it a very big deal. however, rizal is not known to be conversant in filipino languages and except for his exile in dapitan, has never ben to teh south. there wasn’t even an account if he’e ever gone to northern luzon.

I have been following limpbwizit’s blog for almost two years now but it’s a pity that I never got to catch his real name. All I know is that he was a student of top-notch schools in the Philippines (both University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University); a law student who recently took the bar; a native of the world-famous Boracay Island who went on a europe backpacking trip earlier this year. Head on to his blog, this guy has very important things to say about the Philippines and the Philippine Culture.

POSTED IN: Blogs and Websites, People

4 Responses to “Jose Rizal: In Focus”

  1. 1
    DJB Rizalist Says:

    Went over to limpbwizit…hahaha disappointing…he doesn’t realize he is describing himself, to some extent…

  2. 2
    ham Says:

    please view rizal’s ressume.. i can’t find anymore…

  3. 3
    charmaine Says:

    hi!just wana know more about rizal does anybody here knows a place around metro manila where they have a memorabilla of rizal or a monument or something that is not usually found in rizal book? please help me i need it for my project.. tnx

  4. 4
    linian Says:

    luneta ? rizal park? @_@

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