Do you know man?

BIMBO CABIDOG

Conflicting thoughts have tried to explain who man is. Philosophy says he is a “rational animal.” But the more pundits struggle to clarify the phrase, the more they get confused. Rationality itself would become a subject of endless discussion, and so much trouble.

Why am I discussing the subject anyway? Is it really important to know? Maybe not. Ninety nine percent of all the people on earth may not care what being human is all about. And so far, neither philosophy nor science may have satisfactory answer.

But the great thinker Socrates said, “Know thy self,” with very good reason. Part of knowing what to do is comprehending one’s identity. To be satisfied in life is partly to fulfill a purpose as human being.

Purpose has driven man to change creation. Since the first modern humans appeared around 200,000 years ago, the newcomers would leave a distinct mark on earth. The mark drew their identity. Over millennia, human hands would carve a different kind of planet than ever before.

The imprint of man is all over the world today. He has remade and reshaped it. With the infusion of language and later the written word, humans would transform it after their distinct collective purposes.

But unlike God looking at the vast array of creation, and seeing that it was all good, man could not be certain about the worthiness of what he has done. For sure, he keeps on changing things. He is not satisfied, to rest like God in the seventh day of creation.

He could not bring himself to fully enjoy what is happening. Many a times, he agonizes over the consequences of how he lives, or the life he chooses to lead. The common human story hasn’t been that of the proverbial happy-ending type.

Lots of time, man absorbs the cruel blows of fate, and bows to tragic defeat when the curtain falls. He treads a vale of tears under the shadow of death because of frequent miscalculations. This is the result of reinventing himself after his narrow thought, rather than just enjoying the image and likeness the Creator has made him to be.

His woes are thus borne out by what he wants the world to be in conformity with what he sees himself must be. He does not go so far in the journey of reengineering earth in accordance with his aims when a messy and murky life takes over.

What has progress gotten man into? It looks more like a perilous existence heeding towards self-destruction than a place in heaven.

Despite the far-reaching headways that he has blazed in science and technology, man is still buffeted by fates beyond his power to shape. Elusiveness continues to frustrate his search for the ideal state of being that he can finally be happy and contented.

The feeling of emptiness drives him to find meaning and purpose in life. But what he finds is how impossible it is to comprehend both. Empowering victories in every chosen strife would not keep him from not only losing control of his life, but losing himself.

Can he choose not to work? Because he can’t, though he abhors it, he strains to convince himself that he loves it. Actually, it is the thought of having no choice. He must labor, for he believes that is what living is for. Fear of not living forces him to toil, to earn a living.

He must spell his guts out in drudgery to buy food to eat, pay rent, wear decent clothes, and be the human being he should be. A queer sort of reasoning harnesses him to slavery as if it is the law of nature and God.

But even if it is made clear that the God he believes in, and not drudgery, is the One who gives life; and even if the fact is that He has already given it to him without any term or condition, he keeps harping on the wrong notion that he must yet get it from some give-and-take arrangement in the marketplace.

He insists that God helps only those who help themselves ignoring the truth that Jesus Christ has stated: the Son of God came to take under His care those who are weak and lost. In other words, He came to help those who cannot help themselves.

Name a ruler in this world with all the might at his command who nonetheless has not turned helpless one way or the other and needs an extended hand. Cite a strong man who has not sometime pitifully been unable to get over a hump and aches for a push. If sinful mortals can give it to them, how much more can the most loving God?

Alexander the Great, Agamemnon, Darius the Great, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar, Nero, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible and Adolf Hitler arrogated unto themselves the power to crush tens of thousands in the way of their advance. But they could only stop the advance of age and physical deterioration by early death.

“This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead,” according to Ecclesiastes 9:3. Such fate is writ for anyone.

Harry Truman had the power to unleash the world’s first weapon of mass destruction on any population on earth. As president of the United States, when the atom bomb was wheeled into commission for war purpose, he had at the tip of his fingers the choice whether or not to mete instant death to hundreds of thousands of innocent people across the globe.

One day, he chose to give the go signal to drop the bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its detonation instantly incinerated tens of thousands of innocent folks in a blinding flash of the horrific mushroom cloud.

By unleashing the weapon of mass destruction, Truman has introduced to the world the terror of the most powerful man on earth having the option to slaughter a whole population. But where did he go several years after? The butcher and the butchered joined the same mortal fate. He was so powerful as to kill people en masse, but could not prevent his own death.

Packing all that lethal force, the atom bomb yet could not secure a nation from the existential threats surging around it. And a rebellious generation would rise to express those depths of angst and insecurity through anti-establishment clashes. 

“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” The Ecclesiastes once more admonishes.

In the final analysis, no matter how grandiose a life one leads, his human lot will always be that piece of ground to go in when the time comes. Now, there is the man who conquered earth but could not help ending six feet under it.

Eight Thousand Death Anniversaries in One Day

Remembering The Tragedy

BIMBO CABIDOG

The tragedy and extreme ordeal that north-eastern Leyte suffered when Super-Typhoon Yolanda lashed five years ago have nothing compared in historical memory. Part of the non-comparison is the fact that today, November 8, surviving families in Tacloban, Palo and Tanauan – ground zero of the disaster, are observing 8,000 plus death anniversaries of relatives and loved ones at the same time.

Why did such a mind-boggling number of people all perished in less than an hour? More mind-boggling perhaps is the regretful answer: despite the dire warnings of a most severe calamity, the communities along the forecast path of ST Yoianda just threw caution to the wind. The people did not heed the order and pleadings to go to a safe place. They dared the oncoming storm. Some taunted it.

In the tragedy that came with ST Yolanda, lessons have been learned. But perhaps the gravest lesson paid for with thousands of lives is the outlook that disaster is not the product of a hazard event, no matter how severe. It is the function of the vulnerability of the exposed elements, most especially the populace. Had the people strengthened their defenses by fleeing to higher grounds, that is, beyond the reach of the storm surge, deaths could have been minimized or prevented.

The remembrance of Yolanda in a way affirms the value of disaster risk reduction in the confrontation of expected hazard events. This means diminishing the vulnerability of the people, their communities and assets to outbreaks of hazards by being able to fully understand what is going to hit them, and take the proper measure at avoiding impact at its most severe. Unfortunately, the folks at ground zero in Leyte did not comprehend well the freak weather phenomenon internationally named Haiyan.

The Taclobanons in particular missed a model to gauge the fury of a wind tagged by experts to be the world’s strongest in memory. Despite the announcement of Public Storm Warning No. 5, the people did not see Yolanda as something that should terrify and prompt them to run for their lives. They had it wrong and paid dearly for the mistake.

Second, they did not pay much thought to the other hazard: the storm surge. Meteorologists calculated the sea whipped by Yolanda to inundate inland as high as 15 feet. The government made the people aware about the deadly scenario. Again, there was no model to imagine the horrifying underwater episode. The mayor of Tacloban himself didn't know what it was all about.

On hindsight, authorities now know that the scale of the catastrophe brought by the supertyphoon was actually manageable. Loss in lives and properties was well within human capability to minimize if not confine to zero. This was if the affected communities have taken care to buffer vulnerability. Disaster risk reduction and management frameworks around the world of course says that areas along the course of expected hazard events must build resilience and adaptive capacity.

As folks commemorate the tragedy and devastation that struck them four years ago, there should be not only prayers for the dead. There should also be earnest reflection for the living. One for thought is how such a magnitude of disaster can be avoided.

Fresh from the devastation of Yolanda, survivors saw a land that was desolate, because it was stripped of the usual sights over the past fifty years. It was made more desolate by the departure into mass graves of thousands of folks, who just a couple of days ago were still with the living. They could have continued to be, if their vulnerability to the most devastating consequences of calamities has been rendered inoperative.

Let Yolanda teach the ones still around to never underestimate the fury of nature especially at this time when mankind has so destroyed the environment to interrupt its protective and life-preserving functions.