Think about it
Global cataclysm, God forbid!
By Jun Velasco
BECAUSE of myopia, our thoughts are glued to our insecurities.
We are preoccupied with self-flagellation, severely blaming ourselves for the tragedy that that has descended upon us.
To mitigate the pain, we tell ourselves that we, Filipinos, have no monopoly of the climatic tragedy.
That’s why we believe more Alvin Fernandez’s explanation that our sad fate was brought about more by global warming and climate change.
Look at the whole of Southeast Asia – Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, deaths, suffering. Please don’t blame us if we now raise the alarm bells for the next big blow of El Niño, other wise known a s the heat wave the next time around.
After Gonzalo Duque texted us our friend Jimmy Licauco’s article about the realignment of the Solar System, which Jimmy says, would happen sometime in December 1012, we instantly looked for a copy of the article. We know Jimmy. His views are well researched and highly regarded.
He says the realignment thing is a cosmic cataclysm and could cause millions of deaths and untold injuries.
Last week, Jimmy – without bating an eyelash — repeated on TV what he wrote. That disturbed us even more.
Aside from prayers, let us do any of the things we already know that would mitigate damage, reduce pain and put us in league with the Almighty. In phenomenal reversals of nature, we could not even rely on government at any time. The Ondoy disaster showed how vulnerable we all are.
At this juncture, we wish to lift a part of Alex Magno’s recent column for its timely reminder: “Calamity, we now see very clearly, is the offspring of a weak state.”
A weak state, in the technical language of political science, is a regime that is porous to vested interests, powerful lobbies and populist constituencies. Its policies are shaped by short-term interests rather than long-term good, by particular benefits rather than the larger welfare.
A weak state governs for the present; not for the future. Eventually its minor failings accumulate into a major tragedy.
In principle, the state should consistently take the commanding heights. It should look far into the future and anticipate the community’s needs way down the road. It should cover vulnerabilities with preemptive action instead of waiting for bad things to happen and scrambling for a response.
A strong state is like a good general who trains his army and conducts his diplomacy so well as to make war unnecessary. A weak state is like a poor general who relies in extraordinary valor of his men to win a battle from an inferior position.
A strong state requires high quality leadership, the sort that is able to convince constituents that what might be unpopular at the moment is necessary to secure the future. It requires a high quality bureaucracy that plans for the longer term and enforces policies with neither fear nor favor.
A weak state is transactional. It responds to particularistic political stimulus from specific constituencies. It is vulnerable to political accommodation, compromising the integrity of policies to suit immediate contingencies that are insistently noisy rather than ideas that are fundamentally sound.”
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Did God cause the disaster? We believe the mere act of asking the query is ungodly because as Christians we couldn’t believe that God would inflict harm on his beloved creatures. What’s going on darkly in a global manner is man’s abuse of his own life, his ungodly acts, and he has nobody to blame but himself. We go back to what we wrote here last week about man’s propensity to break the rules of God, such as what is embodied in the Ten Commandments. Mother Nature and God, which should have been life’s blessings, are furious because man himself as asked for it. Only ultra-strong prayers could, we believe, reverse our sufferings.
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