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.

A Technologized Life to Make Your Day

BIMBO CABIDOG

You get the hang of the day scrolling on your social media wall for eight hours or more. It’s called information (or in many cases, disinformation) overload. What is it about?

Overload in information or hogwash is same as having gobbled so much stuff from movie marathon viewing five or ten films on a dogged weekend. While at it, you lose yourself to the unnatural realm, disturbed calm.

You absorb the characters, like you are they or they are you, especially the hero ones. You pack yourself with self-identities more than you can be. Your brain groans about to puke.

The online newsfeed churns an engulfing stream of thought that streaks into cognition, like rapid rays from a laser gun: five-paragraph stories, chopped two-sentence narratives, broken hugot (sentimental pull) lines, and short-phrased emotions out of the irrational

The sum of the whole stuns the brain dead with rude electric shocks. And as the laser assault zeros on the core, and you give each of the status feed your energy of thought, you sizzle out like a burnt gunpowder.

What havoc the technological self-knowledge wreaks, rather than organize the mind. So much of it, you forget where you stand and whirl into air. Then from a dizzying height, you swoosh down to the horizon below like a deflated hot air balloon, with absurdly nothing inside.

From all the characters that you wear, you now have to go back to the true you: momentarily the identity of a terrified mortal noticing the ground approach at the speed of light. It is you nauseated as the earth dances around you seeming to go out of balance and smash.

Snap back very quickly or you stay permanently… in nightmare dreamland. Escape from the painfully banal world has been easy. But returning to real life is now about pushing frenziedly the button of a remote commander to switch channel, but the battery is gone.

You have to be where you were, back to friends and loved ones, and the familiar lanes and byways of concrete being. You can’t suck forever from the bytes technology processes. You cannot for so long keep getting informed by the virtual, until elan freezes in dream state.   

So what the hell is information? Understand that even the untrue can be information, for to be simply informed is different from to get the fact. You may be told by a piece of fake news that the president holds office in Mars. That by itself is information, but utterly not the reality you can believe with what you use to know.

Do you live fully or more fully to have alternative reality make up for what life seems short of? Or is it time now to pull off the technology plug? Do so. Stray out of the daily grind. Get off the usual and expected. Tarry a while, look elsewhere, and notice what you did not care to throw attention.

It may be a wildflower in bloom on the roadside that you nearly even trample whenever you walk to work, but finally behold in full splendor. It may be the young kid at play that you eye every day, but do not look at. It may be their extraordinary ordinariness­­ melting your uncaring attitude that will realize what the full or the good life truly is.

Do not be technology-driven and slip into overdrive. Don’t give yourself a harder and harder time to process the finest out of mundane experience. What is peddled in the marketplace is not what you always have to buy, for actually the best things in life are free.

Finally, technology does not produce meaning from data, or wean facts from lies. It just offers the confusion of following either way. It does not raise awareness to the level of enlightenment, half-truths to correct assumptions.

Yes, it can manipulate you to the road of perdition with wrong outputs from presumably right inputs. Break out in no time at all from the slavery of conviction in its superiority to life.

Better sometimes are the uneducated, for they have this immune system against technologized education. They regurgitate out of their mental digestive track its alien falsities. They blow into the limbo of suspicion the feed that their mind does not swallow, because it smells and taste a rotten lie.

No worse turmoil the world may ever hatch than the addictive bowing of freely thinking men to the unthinking machine.

Does Man Own the Earth?

BIMBO CABIDOG

According to science, the earth is not a man’s world. The planet has been existing for 4.5 billion years. Humans have only been here for about 200,000 years.

Earth does not belong to man. It is the habitat of all life forms, many of which have existed hundreds of millions of years before humans first appeared. They, including the Homo sapiens, belong to it.

But since man began to have control over nature, and manipulate it for his ends, he has been acting as if the Earth is his possession. He even has foisted on all of its other habitues, as well as his fellow Homo sapiens, the queer concept of land being private property.

Studies say that there are around 3,000 or more species in a soil environment alone. Does man claim to own them, those that crawl on the surface, the water that slithers through the terrain, the nutrients that feed every form of life from the microscopic germ to the water buffalo, and the flows of energies linking each and every one in an interconnected whole that will probably continue to exist long after humans have been gone? Amazingly, he acts so.

Common sense will tell that the land and the natural biophysical elements present in it are not his, simply because they cannot be bought and could not be made or created by human hands. Their existence and continuity also do not depend on him. In fact it is man with purposes alien to theirs that poses danger to them.

“What arrogance of man to own the land when it is the land that owns man,” Macliing Dulag, a tribal chieftain in Kalinga Apayaon in northern Philippines, chided. He was killed by the minions of the Marcos dictatorship for defending the Kalingans’ ancestral domain against its demolition by the planned Chico River dam project. The kind of arrogance he denounced shed his blood.

What has made humans think and act as if they own the earth? The ownership of private property that society guarantees, especially the acquisition of land as provided by law, somehow reflects the mindset that the world belongs to them. 

Such posture emanated from the time humans began to observe characteristics of nature and discover how to manipulate it. The development immensely changed the way they live. They no longer just abide by what nature provides, but took control of it and used it. Control fostered and firmed up the concept of ownership.

Since humans learned how to control and manipulate nature, around 10,000 years ago, the earth would never be the same again. They harnessed and directed it to achieve what they want. The sea change made the world one virtually shaped by human hands.        

Literature and history portray in innumerable narratives this power of man to make nature pliant to its desires. Hereon, he fashions his own reality from the artificial world he creates. The newfound power gave him not only dominion but domination (or the appearance of it) over creation. This would be the source of his presumptuous idea that the earth or any part of it is his.

Subsequently, man changed himself after the artificial world of his making. He no longer just watches, wonders at, and enjoys the things around him. He could not rest content until he does something to them. The drive or spell of restlessness dogs him no end. 

With reinvented man, the world changes not because of its nature or essence to change, but because of what he thinks it should be. It must be shaped and reshaped after his likeness and desire. It must be subject to his purpose, not that of the creator.

The insatiable impulse to remake the world he lives in necessitated and led to ownership, first as a thought, later as law. Man must take possession in order to control. Although it was merely a product of a certain stage of historical social development, over a long age of practice, ownership of property would become as natural as if it was ordained right at creation.

With ownership, man arrogated to himself the power to do to the natural world as he pleases. Now, the devil is in the thinking that he can do whatever he wants or desires to do with things that have thrived in their natural course long before he came, because they are his. It proceeded to destroy the very earth that supports his life, because he must rebuild it.

No matter how excellent man already is in his ways, that excellence is only limited to the particular role he plays: lawyer, doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, chief executive officer, most of all contributor as well as beneficiary  to the dynamic interactivity of all living and non-living members of the planet. On the other hand, the knowledge and information beyond these roles that he lacks is vast and unfathomable.  

Man’s limited capability cannot even produce a chunk of soil with all the biological and mineral elements present to nurture plant life. Yet, in the single-minded drive to build real estates that later become concrete jungles he so easily destroys it. The destructive character of the alienated man stems from the paradigm of ownership.

Does man think that it is for his own good to own nature, so that he can do with it whatever he wants to?  Well, it is a narrow and dangerous thinking, because its premises and conclusions are confined to what he only knows. It does not comprehend the complex interrelationships, intricate dynamics, and purposes for which each of the myriad components of a natural biophysical environment is there. For all he knows, his destruction of some of them already amounts to the destruction of the very means by which he lives.

There has never been a perfect invention. By experience, everything that man has invented must yet be modified and remodeled unendingly. The internal combustion engine is one example. Its first prototype would soon be deemed inadequate, fuel inefficient, and leave much to be desired. The shortcomings spurred off the crafting of new and better models.

The diesel-fueled version emerged. The reinvention settled many of the nagging issues on the previous models. But every time an upgraded model came up, it would later be found wanting. And so, the dogged work of improving and perfecting went on and on with no end in sight.

Today, the ICE itself is headed for the dump with the invention and eventual mass production of solar and electric powered motors. But long after it has gone, man will yet reckon with the harm it has done to the environment by polluting air, land and water, and by despoiling the natural systems that have sustained life on earth for ages, because of the burning of fossil fuel. The damage done by the sway of the ICE may already be beyond repair.

Despite the unprecedented breakthroughs in scientific research and technology development that make man’s control of nature almost absolute, he still succumbs to fates he doesn’t chart nor expect. Who knew beforehand that cars, once the craze of humankind and symbol of enviable progress, would be a principal culprit for the carbon footprints that are dimming the prospect of human life over the next 100 years?

The pursuit of an elusive, indeterminate being is a fate that hounds man. No matter what he does, there is still always something lacking, something wanting, to complete life. In this instance, he shows not only to lose control, but to be lost himself. He pretends to own things in the natural world, yet he could not even own himself. 

There are a lot of instances beyond his control that pushes him to do things against his will, and even against his own good. He presumes to have nature in his hands, but lies utterly helpless when it lashes back with profoundly catastrophic effects, like the much powerful typhoons due to climate change that devastate communities.

Alexander the Great, Agamemnon, Darius the Great, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar, Nero, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, etc. have had the power to crush tens of thousands of people in the way of their conquests. But they could only stop the conquest of age by a youthful 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.” The passage is from Ecclesiastes 9:3. Does that seem to be man being unmistakably in control of his fate?

Harry Truman came into possession of the world’s first weapon of mass destruction, the freshly hatched atomic bomb, in his term as president of the United States. With it he held power of life and death over millions of people across the globe. One day, he decided to give the go signal to the dropping of the A bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The successful mission instantly vaporized thousands of ordinary folks in the blinding flash of the horrifying mushroom cloud.

Pity the man who has that terrific power, and yet must be slave to supposedly rational decisions that kill people en masse. Where is Truman? The butcher and the butchered have met the same fate. The most powerful man of the world joined later the hapless citizens of the two devastated cities, as all men must go there, the kingdom of the dead.  

The atom bomb has not secured Truman’s generation, and for all times his countrymen, from going the way of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even with such lethal power in their possession, when it is their turn to face the wretched human lot of ending up in the grave. “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Again the Ecclesiastes tells. 

Man Plans, Nature Disposes

BIMBO CABIDOG

The Homo sapiens is the only species that thinks. It uses the thought process to plan. Planning remade the original world of creation after its thought.

Wherever he went, thinking man left a distinct mark. In fact, in the latter part of his existence, he has so changed the Earth, that almost everything in it now bears the imprint of human hands.

The unique capacity to chart outcomes started to determine what the future will be, still in the hunting-gathering stage of human-social development.

The period was around 12,000 years ago, when Man’s activity was solely the procurement of food, foraging in the wild savannahs and woodlands. At this time, the specie already exhibited a characteristic that separated it from the rest of the animal kingdom: it planned and organized to dominate the overpowering forces of nature.

Planning is thinking and deciding. Thinking would become more prominent during the succeeding epoch of the herdsman when humans no longer hunted but pastured animals for food. Animal husbandry ushered a big leap in their advancement.

The domestication of animals and the advent of horticulture (planting) radically changed the mode of human existence. Humans no longer lead a nomadic life. They settled. With settlement, geographically permanent human communities rose.

As they progressed, method more and more determined living instead of brute force. It later spurred off rapid social development.

Of all species in the animal kingdom, only the Homo sapiens show planning. Thinking turned man into a rational animal. Rationality further advanced human intelligence. It evolved language, philosophy, and then science.

The phrase, “the best laid plans of men,” became popular some time ago. They may certainly be credited with where mankind is now, a stage characterized by phenomenal progress in the way it lives. What the world is today can trace to man’s ability to plan.

But did planning really bear out every development, every progress, or every advance? Or did they actually happen beyond the best laid plans of men? Where they intuited, not deliberated?

The discoveries and inventions that brought phenomenal change in the lives of human beings seemed to be intuitive. Many of the stories about them tell that they occurred in a flash of the moment, the lighting of an idea different from what men have used to think.

They did not result from following a charted course. They resulted from veering off course, blazing a new trail, breaking with the past. They resulted from debunking old knowledge and embracing the unthinkable.

For narrow purposes, human intelligence has competed with nature in shaping the future. Societies have charted their development diverging from the sound natural way, and even at loggerheads with it.

It is now being shown by the unchecked befouling of the environment and the disastrous impact of global warming that narrow plans themselves would lay the course of mankind’s self-destruct. Just allowed to take its course, nature on the other hand sustains earthly life.

Development strategies may be credited with fostering unprecedented material advancement. But they also have brought in the decimation of ecosystems and the catastrophic phenomenon called climate change.

As things stand today, the aftereffects of the pursuit of misconceived progress by societies may already have placed Homo sapiens among the species in line for extinction.

Science tells that the biosphere, without the interference of man, draws the perfect design for a world with no hunger, no devastation from calamities made worse by climate change, and no depletion of natural resources beyond recovery. This is cast in the genetic code of species.

The natural world exhibits diversity integrated in one holistic web of interrelationship and dynamic interaction, not only between living organisms, but also between them and inorganic elements, like water, soil, rocks and minerals.

Ecosystems preserve and sustain perfect balance among various elements, such as soil and water, oxygen and carbon dioxide, food and its consumption, and prey-predator populations. Resources cycle and recycle. Mass and energy flow in perfect harmony. Such is the natural design.

The way a lion, a python or an eagle ensnares a prey may be horrifying to witness.  But even as they kill, they preserve life as a whole. They plug a gap in the cycle of life, turn the food chain, obviate the degradation of the environment by limiting other species from wantonly multiplying.

Every organism from the microscopic protozoa to the mammoth whale, and every inanimate object from a tiny pebble to the biggest mountain range, take each one’s place and fulfill each one’s role in the ecological arrangement that supports and sustains life. The DNAs written into their beings set the characteristics that make everything dynamic, one and interconnected.

The fruit man eats, the tree he gets shade from, and the herb he extracts to cure ailment are all blueprinted by the chromosomes of each species. Biological genes have already drawn up how he will secure nourishment for the next ten to fifty years, breathe fresh air, prevent disasters from landslides, break the lash of winds, and regulate climate.

An incomparable intelligence has engineered with perfect synchronization of time and motion how myriads of life forms as well as non-living things shall interact with each and everyone to maintain and reproduce life down to every minute in a holistic planetary ecosystem that manages population of species, provide and distribute food through the predator-prey link, and spin the cycles of energy and matter from generation to generation.

No human ingenuity can ever set life on a journey, like a projectile of a seed coasting along the seashore, finding a right spot on the shallow waters, descending vertically, planting itself on the sandy bed, taking roots, and becoming a new mangrove tree.

Amazingly, the shape, buoyancy, growth characteristics, and even how the seed may end to give birth to a new life have already been encoded by an intelligence that of humans is nothing in comparison. The code is written in the genome of the specie.

Thus, it should not be a surprise if there is indeed a lot of brainy stuff in the supposedly thoughtless wilds. Intelligence and logic unmistakably course through the natural world. There is better order in the jungle, serving the purpose of existing forever, than in human society.

Man plans, nature disposes. He built the grandeur that was the city of Pompeii. In a fury, nature personified by Mt. Vesuvius demolished it with red hot lava and ash. Kingdoms that have once stood proud and basked in the glory of a golden age would end up a heap of ruins, like the Angkor Vat, overrun by dirt and choked by jungle growth.

Over time, nature outlives what men have lived with. Marvels of edifices succumb to the elements. Water constantly dripping on stone and roots creeping under masonry finally tear and reduce to ruble what once were grandiose structures .

With forest covers razed to almost zero by greed, towns that have stood for hundreds of years at last vanish under landslips and liquefied mud cascading from mountains and burying them under meters of earth.

Abuse nature and it will react violently. When there were no more forests to hold water, an abnormally large volume of it roared downstream and drowned 8,000 in Ormoc City, during the lash of a mild tropical cyclone named Typhoon Uring.

But people never learn, or just refuse to, obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. The only way to get out of the path of disasters that are getting worse and more tragic is to let nature take its course. But driven by greed for pointless material prosperity, they couldn’t help it.

Men plan narrowly, nature designs comprehensively. In the name of development, they spend mind-boggling amounts of money and natural resources to build settlements that calamities easily demolish, because they have swept away the barriers that could naturally protect them.

Confronted by seasonal floods and lahar flows that hit communities with tragic effects, the government resorts to building dikes costing billions of pesos that later crack and soon give way to the elements. Officials insist doing so even with the knowledge that what could better deal with the hazards are not engineering but ecological solutions.

Because of the narrow purpose of piling up treasures on earth, humans alas unwittingly make plans that in the long run work against themselves. They devise schemes to get exceedingly rich. But when they have done so, there is nothing left to live off. The natural biophysical environment has been so depleted to further support life and habitation.

With the onslaught of climate change, there may even be no more dry and solid ground to stand on. Man’s proud progress has blown in his face. What support life and really matter – air, water, solar radiation, soil to grow food, and vegetation, are cut off. When the artificial destroy the natural, it has destroyed mankind itself.

Red October Plot? It’s Good to Revisit the Past

BIMBO CABIDOG

When Ferdinand Marcos placed the country under Martial Law on September 21, 1972, were the commies, which he used as the principal reason, poised to seize power?

What Marcos did later would belie it, and make the signing of ML Proclamation 1081 nothing more than a seizure of power by himself.

Now, President Rodrigo Duterte and his cohorts in the military are raising the same communist spectre again. They are presenting the tale of a plot to oust him by the left coalescing with the Liberal Party, Magdalo, newly formed anti-tyranny alliances and even elements of the Armed Forces.

The said political formations were supposed to launch massive destabilization during the 46^th commemoration of martial law. But it did not happen. Duterte’s military cohorts quickly adjusted the ouster plot from September to the next month. They switched the script to one labeled “Red October.”

It might be good to revisit the recent past to see what Red October is really about. Here is an uncanny similarity with what Marcos did 46 years ago, and what Duterte is cooking up now.

After the declaration of martial law on the pretext of a communist takeover, Marcos reigned as a dictator for fourteen years. Contrary to his claim, his rule went unchallenged by any significant armed resistance except by the Moro Islamic movement in the south.

The peace that prevailed actually showed no imminent danger to the nation that warranted suppression of civil liberties, denial of freedom of the press and expression, abolition of Congress, and the night of repressive terror that ensued. But PP 1081 has implanted his fascist dictatorship for good.

In 1972, all the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing, the New People’s Army, had was a rag-tag band of rookies getting their first deadly lessons in guerrilla warfare.

With their political-military strength, for the communists to try in an instant at adventurously dismantling the ruling state machinery and putting up a new rule all over the country was quixotic. It was mission impossible, a no-no for revolutionaries who at the very least still hold their sanity.

Besides being downright stupid, such quick victory schemes were not in sync with the doctrine of protracted armed struggle by CPP founder and first chair Jose Maria Sison.  

No one was in a position to grab state power except Marcos. There was no danger of the country falling under the dictatorship of the proletariat as communism envisions. The supposed grave danger was a barber’s tale propped up by Marcos to justify the dissolution of the liberal democratic political order and installation of his own dictatorship. This was what exactly happened in his palace coup.

The hoisting of the communist bogey followed by the declaration of martial law was a ploy to: one, grab absolute power and foist one-man rule with Marcos doing whatever he wants, unhampered by any democratic checks and balances and dissent: two, perpetuate his reign beyond what was provided by the Constitution, with no more time limit.

The painting of the spectre of communism convinced the people for a while that ML was necessary. But they found out soon that they were fooled. The CPP-NPA was nowhere near any seizure of power. Decades since, the armed left has not even gotten off the strategic defensive phase: the stage of armed struggle where it still lacks the capability to mount large-scale offensives and possess territory.

After surmounting this first stage, the revolutionary movement still has to hurdle two more – the stages of stalemate or parity of force with the government, followed by the stage of counter-offensive, before it could finally establish its own “national democratic” state with a “socialist perspective.”

The succeeding second and third hurdles look into probably a century more of warfare to accomplish complete victory if such is ever achievable.

Right now, a communist capture of power is a punch at the moon. The CPP-NPA merely has gone as far as gain the reputation of waging the longest running insurgency in Asia. But parity of forces and weaponry with the government is not in sight – near or far.

So go back 46 years ago, how Marcos was blatantly lying. The fearful image he presented about communism being ready to swallow the whole country was a hoax. The movement’s challenge then consisted mainly of isolated ambuscades in thinly dispersed pockets of armed resistance, accompanied by teach-ins in campuses.

Those  who decided indeed to take up arms and go to the countryside were but a bunch of intellectuals fresh from the academe combining with remnants of the defunct Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan. The two groups reconstituted a fledgling army after the HMB’s route by the Magsaysay government.

Fourteen years later, history would take an unfortunate turn for both the Marcos dictatorship and the CPP-NPA, shortening the life span of the former, while lengthening the protracted struggle of the latter. The turn was Edsa 1 capping the anti-dictatorship ferments in February 1986.

The often-called people power revolution at Edsa ousted Marcos via a peaceful civilian-military revolt driven by the middle class, under the auspices of the traditional political opposition and rich business sponsors in Metro Manila. It also prolonged the timeframe of the left, thereby setting its protracted struggle on yet an open-ended course.

As one effect, the historical divergence shifted the attention of the people from the political front with a still festering armed conflict to the economic front. This made it harder for the CPP-NPA and its broad political arm, the National Democratic Front, to expand the ranks of the armed revolution.

Another effect was the restoration of democratic space under a new dispensation. This diverted attention of the masses from pursuing further socio-political change to settling down and taking opportunity with what the post-dictatorship arrangement has to offer.

Among other setbacks for the left is the post-1986 newly contracted indulgence in political talk and electoral Monday morning quarterbacking of the citizenry. The counterproductive and misled kind of political involvement riveted ordinary folks in all walks of life.

The post-Marcos order made the people forget that there were still so many things to do outside the electoral path to secure substantial and meaningful improvement in their lives.

The left’s target mass base for itself would be hoodwinked into engrossing in chatter over the topic of elections, which were turning out to be futile deceptive exercises as far as the interests of the basic social sectors – the peasant, workers, urban poor, youth, women and professionals, were concerned.

Certain reforms, like the enactment of the Local Government Code, would bring beneficial results hoisting a semblance of meaningful change that the masses clung to. But these shied away from the social transformation that the left purveyed.

In the 46^th annual commemoration of ML, the insurgency of the CPP-NPA-NDF continues. But it still has not progressed into the stage when it could already inflict decisive defeats on state forces and take position of territory that it could well defend.

Like before, the reds are still in no mood for insurrectionist adventure wishing to sweep the whole country in an armed conflagration. They have neither the firepower, nor formidable mass base, nor heated social condition to kindle it.

So what then is the Red October about that Duterte is mongering? By all indication, it is more of a Hollywood-like production with a badly written script than any genuine blueprint for drastic regime change.

Duterte’s loyal choir among the AFP generals are taking preposterous lengths to present the plan for the so-called Red October in paper marked with large fonts that spell SECRET. Does any plotter of a government ouster resort to such idiocy?

Nonetheless, there is a sinister plot that the citizens must fear and worry. It is a plot to foist Marcos-style fascism using once again the communist bogey. This is the installation of a regime misleadingly labelled revolutionary government, to put the country under Duterte’s absolute and unlimited rule.

The chilling past is coming back to haunt again. The Red October smacks of déjà vu.

Where is people power?

BIMBO CABIDOG

The palace says people power won’t work against Duterte. The statement is of course fallacious. People power will always work against anybody in power. The question is: will it yet happen?

People Power II cut short the term of President Joseph Estrada. The country may now be worse off than during Erap’s time. But the massive numbers of citizens that overthrew him are off the streets. 

The atrocities during Ferdinand Marcos’ fourteen years of dictatorship seem like juvenile delinquency compared to the terror, disregard of the rule of law, murderous impunity, trampling of democratic institutions and pure wickedness that grip the country today. But where are the demonstrating millions that figured in Edsa 1 and 2? What happened to people power? 

One thing is sure: the people have not gone anywhere. They are in the country, dispersed all over the length and breadth of the archipelago. And they continue to make history if of a different kind – a history of not taking collective action even as the situation worsens.

But the power to debunk the order of the day is inert. The dynamo of radical political change that has seen bad rulers in the past fell before civilian upheavals could not be harnessed, not now anyway. It sleeps in the hands of the citizenry. 

People power lies cold, although not dead. The youthful warriors who went into the chill of the night to fight with nothing but each one’s firm conviction are no more than ghosts of the past to haunt the paranoid powers-that-be. No inducement at present could whip their numbers back again. 

The concerned citizens who flocked in their hundreds of thousands into a defenseless twelve-lane highway squeezed between two major military camps, to shield mutineers from the wrath of a dictator, wouldn’t budge an inch anymore to defy another more atrocious fascist dictatorship. 

Is there no longer hope in the so-called people power yet rising? Have the citizens grown tired of it, or realized it as a big mistake? The answers to all are No!

The dynamo of social-political change is still very much available for history making. It just isn’t turning now, or it can’t be turned yet. The energy is at rest.

The tectonic political movements of Edsa 1 and 2 that toppled two rules in the country not by election but by citizens’ uprising are still being seen by majority of Filipinos as events of epic proportion elevating the country in the eyes of the world. They represent the race’s noble and heroic character.

They were certainly not a regretful blunder, but moments of glory and pride throughout the country’s long history of fighting oppression. So why are the people not going for it now in the face of unbridled tyranny? Why are there no rising in the streets?

Disabuse your mind of the thought that the Edsa experiences in 1986 and 2001 were revolutions. They were not. The people who massed up in what would evolve into full blown uprisings were not plotting to change the social or political order. They were merely responding to a call vested with life and death urgency. Their action, knowingly or unknowingly, was tactical. It was for the short-term purpose of confronting an issue.

Yes, the affairs did not fall along a strategic course, consciously charted by ideological beacons over a long period of time, to fundamentally transform society. They were a spontaneous and instant response to a situation. They passed no hatching or weeks of deliberation. They just struck on impulse.

One common thing about their implosions was their being unplanned. No conscious political force engineered, much more organized, them. They just sprang like mushroom blooms on a clear day. They sprang from a ripened revolutionary moment, unscheduled and spot on.

It is the moment of profound crisis that political thinkers talk of: the resistance or repugnance of the ruled to rule in the old way, and the failure of rule to rule in the same old way. The political dynamo that turns change is the spontaneous and instantaneous action of the people to confront a situation.

Without the presence of the said crisis, expect no people power. This is because it cannot simply be commanded, induced or enticed to rise. It has a mind of its own. It heeds a different voice than agitators or partisan leaderships would presume. In fact, it can distrust them or being led by them.

The usual banners, colors and oft-rehashed slogans may pose a sectarian barrier to it. They can discourage more than encourage people power. The people in their millions affiliate only with the genuine expression of what they think or feel, not what self-claimed revolutionary vanguards want them to think or feel.

Sometimes, interested political entities in the eagerness to rally the people under their calls actually alienate them. Why doesn’t people power spring to action now? A reason may be the alienation and distrust of the people re those calling for it.

Two determining factors have been shown to bring about people power. One is the objective condition prevailing at the given moment. This is the existence of a profound crisis of rule that makes the order no longer tenable, acceptable or livable to the ruled. It needs only a triggering incident to explode, like the foiled mutiny of a bunch of the Armed Forces' junior officers accompanied by the call of Cardinal Sin to shield them with civilian warm bodies in the glaringly dying moments of the Marcos dictatorship .

The other is the subjective state of the masses. This is the awareness and sense of profound injustice that they think as well as feel impossible to live with anymore. Such a consciousness, coupled by the conviction that action to resist the prevailing regime is right as it champions no other agenda than theirs, makes the political setup volatile.

Kindling the latter is no simple matter. In the present situation it is being doused by the people's historical experience themselves of the post-Edsa period. Edsa 1 may be credited with democratic restoration, but it did not make the majority truly rule. Alas, the people have begun to see that.

The era brought about by the removal of Marcos merely restored the power and wealth of the elite cliques that lost them to his dictatorship. The Lopezes for one regained Meralco including the electric coops that sprouted during the time the government has already taken over the utility.

The comeback of the pre-martial law order during the post-martial law period ushered the reign of political dynasties and the same old politicians using money to buy elections and thereby gain bureaucratic entitlement to the division of economic spoils compounded by the raiding of the public coffers.

The launching of people power in the long run did not put power in the people. The succeeding post-Marcos dispensation left them powerless. it excluded them from rule. It rendered them helpless against corruption and greed by the elite that frustrated their aspirations of a better life.

Conditions would worsen that it again necessitated one more political upheaval of citizens massing at Edsa to remove another despicable rule. People power II succeeded in changing regime not by the constitutional route of elections, but by the forceful removal of a sitting president through massive and paralyzing demonstrations. But again the aftermath of the saga left the people holding an empty bag. They were still powerless, excluded from rule by the elite, and condemned to suffer far worse conditions.

Social enlightenment could have hedged the people against victimization by politicians especially in elections that always turn out to be self-defeating exercises for them. But no one and nothing helped them. Even the left which has arrogated the task of educating the masses would dismally fail in raising their consciousness.

Such were the post-Edsa realities that now make them wary against being used again in people power sagas by political interests extraneous to theirs. Given the subjective state, forged by painful lessons from the past, no call for people power may yet hope to be heeded until the conditions have become ripe for themselves to call for it.

The LOSS Syndrome

BIMBO CABIDOG

Lack or scarcity can be more imagined than real. But thinking of them paralyzes. Majority of people usually don’t move even if they have to, because they think they don’t have enough to get things going.

The mental state pulls back action and stops the brain from thinking any further. Unfortunately, many if not most of the traditional leaders the masses rely upon to take action on their woes or do feats that not just anybody could do, succumb to the LOSS syndrome that is: the lack or scarcity standpoint.

Same is true with those at the helm of local governance. Mayors or local chief executives perennially complain of not having funds to implement programs or projects for development. Actually, the thinking has become a customary excuse for not being able to do something to benefit constituents. 

If there is Friday sickness among employees, there is not having the resources as favorite excuse of heads of offices for short performance. They could have already addressed festering problems. But needed wherewithal were not available, they commonly rue. 

So, sorry na lang for the served who expect more of the usual. Certain initiatives, though part of the job description, could not be done because they presumably need money to take off, but unfortunately it is limited or unavailable. 

Nothing has been done or is being done? The reason always is that government is hard-up. The agency has meager budget to carry on its host of functions. Though meritorious and warranted, projects have to wait for the availability of funds. Hang on demand or need, better luck next time. 

But there is a saying among Tagalogs: Aanhin pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo? (What are you still going to do with the grass, if the horse is already dead?) A solution may be the most ingenious to have been thought of. But if a problem has done its worse, can any good still happen? 

Answers are not supposed to take forever. They can’t. They must be timely. The soundness of response is not only in its correctness, but in its being delivered in real time. There is more frustration in a good deed that is useless, simply because it is too late. 

Politicians and bureaucrats in government are fond of blurting out bright plans that the people become hot and very excited about, only to douse them in the end with the cursory remark: “Sayang di natin magagawa ito dahil walang pondo!” (It’s a waste we can’t do this because there are no funds!) 

Somehow, looking at challenges from the Lack Or Scarcity Standpoint has become a habit of the mind. In most cases, LOSS is attitudinal rather than factual. It owes to two salient reasons. One is non-concern, thus, the lack of commitment. LOSS is the quick excuse for people who really don’t care.

Second is the hesitance or outright resistance to walk the extra mile, and deliver more than the average. Often, it is even the reluctance to break the norm of eschewing responsibility, trumping diligence, and carrying on below par performance. 

Non-performing assets in public service have gotten inured to doing nothing but enjoy bureaucratic entitlement. So, in the face of challenges and responsibility, they hang up hands saying: “Wala tayong magagawa!” (We can do nothing.)

The government should have more of service-driven and dedicated public servants who have none of the LOSS syndrome, rather than the opportunistic feeling-entitled pretenders who are only after power, pays and perks they don’t deserve. 

Even real inadequacy in resources can be overcome if implementors of projects can get rid of the LOSS syndrome. There is actually no scarcity of resources, only scarcity of options. Many heroic persons who care to give more than they receive have proven that. 

In dire straits, everyone has to do each one’s best to pull all collectively to calm seas. Those who do so should be creative and resourceful in hurdling perennial shortness of means. They should adopt the character of not giving up before adversity, simply because they are barehanded, but of waging struggle if from scratch, surmounting the impossible. 

For a country in hard and turbulent times, there is no place for closed minds that tell it can’t hurdle, because we are simply poor. Of course, in the complexity of a nation’s existence and rise, we are ultimately rich, not only in means but capabilities to secure them. 

The ship must reach safe and warm port or all aboard will perish. The attitude should be: we shall. The vessel should not unfortunately go down to the bottom of the sea, because of a crew that keep on saying, maybe, but, if….

Amid times of trouble, there is no time to indulge worries on what we only have or have not. Out with the psychological deficit syndrome, let’s go rolling. Let’s do it!

The Power To Dream

BIMBO CABIDOG

Sleep is the time, according to a passage in the Book of Job, when God visits us. Well, everyone seems not to notice it. 

But isn’t such a humdrum and common occurrence for every human being indeed mysterious? One thing sure, we spend half or one third of our time on earth in that other reality.

Once, sleep treated me to the sensation of a pleasantly disorienting dream. I dreamed of flying. It seemed very real I thought: wow I could fly! 

The experience exhilarated even long after I awoke, which kept me wondering: can I really fly? Yes perhaps I can, owing to some unexplored factor like the power to dream.

Well, this was how I did fly. 

After a fest of chicken in coconut milk broth for a heavy supper, there was nothing to do. I bide time in the moon-bathed veranda of my enchanted hut under coconut grooves. 

In a while, drowsiness swept over me. I snuggled on a bamboo bench and let go. The shutters to the outside world closed. I shunted into the twilight zone.

Immediately, wind flooded through me in a shaking rush. Some esoteric force lifted my body into a horizontal position off the ground, and objects sped past me, or I was actually speeding past them. 

There was an aisle of a massive structure as of a cathedral through which I sailed above the heads of people. It stunned me to discover in split of a second that I was airborne. I quivered to think so.

Into an antechamber and connecting corridor I coasted. Then I was suddenly out in vast open space. I began to climb the heights, soaring on a curve line upward. The atmosphere was thinning. I thought I was touching the sky.

At that level, where houses on the ground already looked minuscule, I accelerated. I cruised along the swirling airspace, farther and farther away from ground zero. Down below spread a stretching vista of magnificent terra firma, a wavy carpet of vegetation glimmering like a massive sea. 

In distant intervals settlements welled, where brightened blocks of houses nestled defined by streetlights. The people must be already asleep, unmindful of what's going on above them.

The scene below under the moonlit night sky bounced back a luminescent aura up to where I streaked throbbing aerodynamically to the rush of wind currents. 

Then I slipped to becoming conscious of myself in a sphere I was not supposed to be. I am human, and I have no wings to fly. I can’t do so. Is it really happening? The weight of the thought began to pull me down.

Hesitation switched to apprehension. I sensed the bright glow in my face turned to the cold ash of fear. What if the force suddenly stops? Up in the towering heights, the earth’s gravity will again assume jurisdiction over my body mass and its paperweight condition will hastily transform into a solid ball of lead hurtling back to ground level with the speed of sound. I quivered to think of it. 

Doubt pulled a quick downward tug on me. Confusion poised to storm in. I intuitively knew, once I allow it, flight would shift to falling. Kilometers up from ground zero would be done in seconds. And I would be swatted on hard ground like a mosquito on the windshield of a car speeding at 150 kilometers per hour. 

Instinct told me that I had to regain the belief in myself flying, and that I could do it forever. With the thought, confidence lifted me up again. I scrambled to try the arching sky-ways. I was now at the threshold of the great ranges of the heavens cruising on a steady course. 

I didn’t even remember that in that altitude, the air pressure could already blow me into smithereens. I lodged on the awareness of myself as itself a dimension of air in human form.

Years since the unforgettable episode, I would keep reflecting: did I dream or did I actually become another being, much like pressing the button of a remote commander and changing TV channel? 

Perhaps, answer to that in a Taoist frame of mind can lead us out of present human dilemmas. Maybe, it can show the way to a better life, and horizons of unlimited alternatives for full existence.

The path starts with the power to dream. Who knows, such may lead to the lost garden where the tree of life grows?