Creating personal websites is always a disheartening affair. You think you´ve got a special idea on your head and that people would find it interesting, but nothing can lure them to join you in your quest to at least, through bits and maps, virtually change the world.

The idea of the universal binary code has been sold a lot of times, and unfortunately, you are merely just a page in the digital world.

And when I first pitched the idea to some friends to create a website with a social responsibility angle, it fell on deaf ears. Disappointed at the outcome, I totally abandoned writing. 

But ideas are hard to bury, unless fully realized.

Having moved to Madrid as a Filipina expatriate two years ago, we decided to create our own website in honor of the newspaper with the same namesake, La Solidaridad, which was first published at the end of the 19th century as the first Filipino propanda newspaper.  La Solidaridad was more than a newspaper. It was the society of Filipino intellectuals, the ilustrados, who have moved to Madrid to seek adequate representation of The Philippines in the Spanish cortes. The head of this movement was ofcourse our very own national hero, Jose P. Rizal.

In the first issue of La Solidaridad, the editorial expressed the aim of the newspaper.

          "Our aspirations are modest, very modest. Our program, aside from being simple, is clear:
           to combat reaction, to stop all retrogressive steps, to extol and adopt liberal ideas, to
           defend progress, in a word to be a propagandist, above all of democratic ideas in order
           to make these supreme in all nations here and across the seas."

           "The aims therefore of La Solidaridad, are described to collect, to gather libertarian ideas
            which are manifested daily in the field of politics, science, art, literature, commerce, 
            agriculture and industry.

Reading it all over again has reminded me of what this webpage´s focus should be: to be an avenue for new ideas and to be a meeting point of cultures in order to gain understanding and respect towards each other. And as much as how technicaly disengaged that sounds, we would put all our efforts, though miniscule, in order to continue what the others have started. 

I know how ambitious that sounds especially when the challenge is much more difficult. During their time, it was clear which establishment they were up against. This time, the establishment comes into the form of indifference, unfortunately lurking inside of us. 

Almost a century later, La Solidaridad is back resurrected.