In South Orange, New Jersey we used to have a spring cleaning day when residents could put out all their household discards on the berm and the town would pick them all up and send them away to trash collection centers. Every year, on the night before pickup day in the Spring, our berm was overflowing with discarded toys, broken furniture, appliances and other odds and ends that my first wife and I had decided we no longer needed.
On one such night before pickup day, my brother, his wife and sister-in-law came to our house to return a station wagon that my brother had borrowed from me.
On seeing the pile of discarded household items, my brother exclaimed: "Oh no, she finally kicked Cesar out."
My first wife and I were the least likely people to ever get married. We were exact opposites in most things, the only commonality was our love for literature. But even on that we eventually diverged. She continued to read voraciously, while I stopped reading. It was therefore just a matter of time before she would kick me out of the house and eventually out of her life.
I've been trying to go back to a comfort zone that I had left more than forty years ago when I immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. At first I thought it would be easy, since my childhood friends still looked the same - only a little older - and seemingly welcoming me with open arms.
But much has changed over the years. I'm no longer the same guy who left long ago, and no matter how hard I try to fit in, I'm just not like my friends anymore.
I am passionate about my politics, am a liberal-progressive now to the core. Shortly after my graduation from high school, my father lost his fortune to politics - dirty politics - and for a few years I knew what it was like to have a father who was broke and to be poor. I am therefore attracted to the causes that help the poor, the downtrodden, especially here in America, and most of such people are usually either African-American or Hispanic.
It has made no difference how much I earn, I have always identified with the teeming masses, the "milling, moiling miasma" of the underclass. (The phrase in quotes is a borrowed phrase from a campus friend I admired when we were both in college at La Salle in the Philippines.)
I am perfectly happy in the U.S. There is a place for me here. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of Americans who similarly passionately pursue the goal of helping minorities and the downtrodden lift themselves up by the bootstraps. There's the billionaire George Soros and MoveOn.Org. There's the Clintons, Al Gore, Bill Gates, Barbara Streisand. There's the Brangelina tandem. There are celebrities galore who are devoting a good chunk of their leisure time to helping the disadvantaged.
When I take that same passion for the underclass to my birth country and to the friends I left behind and who would be my social circle if I finally decide to pull the trigger on my Philippine retirement, all I get are blank stares. My friends, who are very much a part of the elite in the Philippines, cannot understand why I care more about the downtrodden than about their feelings.
In a country that runs on the culture of exploitation of the masses, it is very difficult to find among the elite the same passion for proletariat politics that we liberals in the U.S. eat, drink and breathe.
While my friends have not changed over the past forty years, I am already light years away from them. As members of the elite - the ruling class - in the Philippines, my friends are partly responsible for the status quo. I don't think that they have consciously contributed to the problems that beset the Philippines, in fact they probably have genuinely struggled to be at one time or another a part of the solution.
But the Philippines is a basket case. At some point one has to decide: do I continue to knock my head against that immovable object, or do I give in and achieve an accommodation? The question is moot, because most of my childhood friends are retired. At 10 p.m. they are getting ready to go to bed. They have grandchildren who remind them every day that they are old. In a culture that accords the greatest respect to older people, they feel comfortable in being old.
In the U.S. where everybody wants to stay young, you feel good if you go through life without any major medical issues and can still do what young people do. People here respect you more if you constantly defy the aging process. and not give in.
On a personal basis, my friends are still my friends. We are friends forever. But we are very different now. I still feel that my greatest work is ahead of me. I am trying to make a difference not only in the U.S. - which is my home now - but also in the Philippines, which I feel needs my help.
Most of my friends are just retired, or about to retire, and enjoying their golden years.
Talk about my wife putting me out along with the discarded household items on the berm. Recently I tried to post a message to my high school Internet group. It would not accept my post and when I checked, yahoogroups told me that I was not a member of the group.
They finally kicked me out of the house.
It was like going to a Thanksgiving dinner and finding out you had to eat in the porch and not at the dining room table with everybody else.
It was only a matter of time before my friends would decide that I can no longer be one of them, at least not with my noisy and peace-shattering politics and worldview, which drive me every day of my life and which drives some of them crazy.
It was only a matter of time before my friends would say enough is enough, we don't want to hear your opinions, we don't care what you think - and shut me up.
I want to change my world, they are happy and content with their world. And none of them want to hear about the health care reform in the U.S., the debate that is currently raging in my new home country. None of them want to hear that the Philippines sits on a social powder keg.
There are two images about Home that readily come to mind. There's Michael Buble's beloved hometown in the song "Home." And then there's Thomas Wolfe's Home in "You can't go home again."
