A Good Day to Buy Books!

I’m so happy that “people power” still works in this country! Thanks to the Bloggers Revolution against the Great Book Blockade of 2009, we finally have NEWS worthy of the front page – Taxes on Book Imports have been LIFTED! Enough of the Haydengate tapes puh-leez! To be honest, it’s been a long time since I’ve been this socially vigilant. I feel my Filipino pulse beating in a victorious march. And like in any battle, there are certainly lessons to be learned from the scars we brought home from the war. I liked what my literary savant friend Paul Catiang said in his recent blog entry. To quote…

“…But part of me considers the taxes a blessing, if only for their disturbing effect on those who consider themselves literate, including me. Leto Atreides as the God Emperor once said (and I paraphrase loosely) that he wished to give humankind a predator, one that kept them on the edge of survival. The Department of Finance seems to me to be an even worse cliché, because other stories (Fahrenheit 415, 1984, Equilibrium, and that horrendous movie, The Postman) have antagonists who destroyed books because of their power. Sadly, the DoF was the bad guy in that books were just another taxable commodity. And yet they were our predator for the start of this year. For what it's worth, Secretary Teves and Undersecretary Sales deserve thanks for bringing this to light. They've made the act of reading much sweeter.”

And I nod in a bittersweet sigh on this thought. This experience truly taught us the age old adage, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone!” I just realized that we are indeed very blessed to have this freedom to read – the right to knowledge. And yet a lot of us still ignore what is actually now a “privilege”. Imagine those countries with closed-door policies! Imagine North Koreans whose only reality is their blind faith and allegiance to their God-Leader. So go… flip through your favorite childhood fairy tales again… dust those college-required-reading-list novels… heck, read those mushy Sweet Dreams pocket books and relive those days when a good weekend means burying your head in a book.

Better yet, update your bookshelves. Help the importers who had to suffer from this ordeal. Today is definitely a good day to buy books!