Think about it
Let’s talk about the weather for once
By Jun Velasco
RARE BIRD. Congressman Pol Bataoil pole vaults to his district’s flooded areas from the national disaster center in the company of Executive Secretary Jojo Ochoa to be with his constituents. He is a far cry from other politicians, often dubbed fair weather public servants, who would only show up when there’s assurance they won’t get wet literally and figuratively.
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Our quote this week from the famed philosopher-writer Oscar Wilde must have been written when the times were still safe and environment-friendly.
But with that recently shown film, “20l2,” and the report from the Mayan calendar on the alignment of the planets, man has taken another look at the weather.
We are reminded of then Vice Mayor Alvin Fernandez who in defending the city’s responsibility for the city’s flooding blamed it on Climate Change.
Bull’s eye! No less than former Vice President Al Gore agrees with Alvin. Gore even won a Nobel Prize for his book, “The Inconvenient Truth” which documents man’s abuse of his environment.
Last week, we happened to pass by the city’s submerged parts aboard a sleek Solid North bus. No small car, we were foretold, could pass flooded roads in Central and North Luzon.
A fellow passenger, an old woman, couldn’t contain her grief amid the Dagupan ocean, “anto ya anak, singa sampot lay mundo amo?”
You couldn’t blame her dread. Dagupan, once mostly river if not a swath of marshland, looked like an ocean the other Saturday night, where only one or two big vehicles would appear on the flooded streets.
In some respects, Typhoon Pedring was worse than Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng, even if only a hundred persons perished from it. Against Ondoy’s and Pepeng’s thousands.
These upheavals of Mother Nature are clear evidence of a world going out of its spin. Man is at once challenged to find ways or devise new schemes to protect himself.
The irony is this deepening sense of uncertainty was brought about by one certain thing: in his desire to tame the environment and “improve” himself, man is destroying himself.
Mark the word “himself” to show that he, far from his other attributes, is individualistic, self-centered, proud, unsociable; has no regard for the welfare of his neighbor.
Let’s not go far. Just look around. If you analyze our community’s downgrade, you won’t fail to see that most of our rivers and lakes, these small bodies of water God has gifted us with have been covered with — not just silt really — but landfill to give way to housing, subdivisions or commercial projects.
Man’s desire to improve his economic status led him to encroach on properties not his own, especially government or public land, which is the easiest to abuse what with most of us lacking patriotism or civics.
It’s too late now for one to realize that man’s abuses have staged a vengeance, the bursting of dikes that let loose surges of floodwaters into our otherwise safe residences.
The old woman’s fearful utterance brings to mind ongoing construction of “modern Noah’s arks,” one in the US and another in China, in anticipation of another Great Deluge, which, by the way, should be dismissed outright if you are Christian.
God promised not to do it again.
Too, you’d be amused by the knee-jerk reactions of government and environmentalists such as MMDA’s proposal to double-wall Metro Manila from Manila Bay’s storm surges.
You know, we’ve got to give it to former Speaker Joe de Venecia for having foreseen Nature’s devastation. He had proposed in the early 90’s covering the Philippine mountains and the lowlands with one billions trees. We wonder why the ingenious proposal was dismissed as outlandish by certain sectors. Had the outlandish idea grown out of the ground, we may not have gone through these harrowing experiences.
Up to now the outlandish idea has yet to be put to action.
That’s the whole point. We talk about an idea which an entire race needs badly on a seasonal basis.
So we can’t blame anyone for our woes — but ourselves.
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