Primitive Philippines

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/4/2006



El Niño brings water and electricity shortage, La Niña deluge. With both alternating we get landslide and drought killing scores. While we can not say that anyone can totally cancel out the impact of powerful natural forces that turn into calamities, we can say that the Philippines today is retrogressing in using modern science and engineering to control devastation from such natural forces and turn them into useful resources. More water impounding structures should catch rainfall to thwart droughts and provided cheap water and power spurring modern protected communities.

The problem, according to a news item Sunday morning, is that “poverty ensures disasters’ repeat” according to analysts the report quotes, including Dick Gordon who does seem to have a head for publicity but not for real solutions. The question, stupid, is why is poverty still haunting this country after centuries of production of goods from export – from the time of the Spaniards, through the American colonial and neo-colonial period (which is up to the present) when everything from gold, copper and human slaves are being exported. Well, so much for the “export economy” – proof enough its crap.

The report adds that “climate change” also ensures the country’s disasters will get worse – as if climate change is a 21st century phenomenon. Climate change is believed by some theorists to have wiped out the dinosaurs but modern homo sapiens who’ve been around the planet for the past hundred thousand years has seen quite a number o major climactic shifts in that period but they haven’t been wiped out – that’s because their brains are bigger than dinosaurs and they have been using it to beat the mindless forces of nature. Now let me see the “analysts” find solutions better than dinosaurs.

Poverty is cited as the reason for all the problems of the country, but why is the country in poverty? When we see the top twenty corporations in the country, most of them controlled directly or indirectly by foreign corporate behemoths, earning net profit to the tune of P 300-B or so a year a year and debt payments to the IMF and local bank oligarchs running to P 850-B, then maybe we will understand the dire straits that the country continue to sink into. What is left to lift the Filipino up and out of poverty and into the modern, prosperous and secure world of civilized human beings?

The report says in the Philippines “more than 50% of the population are living on less than two dollars a day … Despite the repeated disasters… many Filipinos are too poor to leave dangerous areas”. They suggest a return to the nomadic life for Filipinos? To their tents as nature dictates? In my few travels to Europe, U.S., China, Southeast Asia, I have seen concreted mountains to keep communities around them safe, barriers to stop snow avalanches, etc. and all because they simply can afford; but then they are not caught in a debt trap nor is their economy being plundered like ours’.

Many Filipino families today live as primitive man did 60,000 years ago when fire was just discovered by some grunting homo sapien and his cousins first walked into Australia. Electric or gas stoves are already relics from the past in many urban poor communities around Metro-Manila, and they’ve traveled back into the future (with apologies to Michael J. Fox) and returning to life around the cave fires for lighting and cooking. But privileged Filipinos like congressmen have ultra modern lifestyles – limousine, coat and tie, even if like Nograles they look Neantherthal.

From Internet sources I counted seven climate changes in the last 100,000 years caused by climactic cycles or natural events like the major eruption 75,000 years ago of Sumatra’s Mt. Toba which changes the earth’s climate for hundreds of years. Homo sapiens survived all of these. The greatest danger to man is not nature and climate change but man himself, it is still a valid question to ask if we will all survive Bush and Cheney’s expected last ditch attempt at creating global war by nuking Iran. For the Philippines the question is, will we survive Gloria before her liver takes her away?

I am not gloating over the problems Gloria has with her health, that’s where we are all going any way; but hopefully later than Gloria so we can see the rise of a revitalize Philippines. Health, by the way, is one area where going primitive is better than going modern. I also have fatty liver and I suspect it’s from too much tetracycline prescribed me by my most well-intentioned doctors from the 70’s (tetracylcine was hugely popular when bacteria and viruses started eating penicillin for breakfast), my best way to reverse the condition is take green leafy vegetable all the time.

If you note that some humor has returned to my column today it is because my liver is happy as I have leaves of mustasa, kamote, sayote, kangkong and a few others I cannot recall for my breakfast and lunch, and as I am writing this. I chase down the leaves with tomato juice now, at breakfast it was chocolate soya milk. Gloria could treat the Filipino people a little nicer if she change her diet of cognac to these primitive foods. Have a happy December.

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