State of the nation: Evacuation August 14, 2006
BARELY HAD THE SPIT DRIED ON GMA’S mouth (after she delivered her State of the Nation Address) when several things happened to reveal the true state of the nation. The state of the nation is not the Enchanted Kingdom. The state of the nation is: Evacuation.
Evacuation is what’s happening to the OFWs in Lebanon, for the most part maids, many of whom are back home richer only in experience—of the harrowing kind. They are impoverished otherwise, having managed to scramble to safety only by the skin of their teeth, bringing home only the pasalubong of being alive. My heart went out to that mother who was sobbing over her daughter, her youngest, who was being wheeled out of the airport, the girl’s body broken and bruised after leaping out of a building to escape a master who refused to let her go. The mother was thankful her daughter had at least come home breathing, and kept vowing that, money or no money, she wasn’t ever going to let her go back abroad. I wondered how long her vow would hold.
Evacuation is what’s happening in Albay in the areas around Mayon Volcano. Mayon is threatening to blow its top once more, thick smoke billowing out of its crater of late, the roiling magma underneath pushing upward demanding to be released. Many folk have already packed up their belongings and gone to evacuation centers. Some others refuse to go. As one woman—who was coolly pedaling her sewing machine while all the fuss was going on around her—put it, why should she? They were already used to Mayon threatening to blow. If worst comes to worst, they could always run away. They were confident they could outrun Mayon’s fury. It was the story of their life: outrunning life’s volcanic explosions.
It’s not altogether hard to understand the reticence to go. It’s precious little choice dying instantaneously from molten fire or in slow-motion from losing one’s livelihood. As far as I know, few people in this country really die from being swallowed up by onrushing burning rock. The casualties pile up more from the effects of the volcanic explosions, as in Pampanga, when lahar and mudslides came to quite literally bury the hopes and dreams of thousands of farmers.
I remember that when natural disasters struck in great plenitude during Cory’s time, folk began to whisper, “Malas si Cory.” (Cory is unlucky) Life wasn’t at all that hard at the time—certainly it wasn’t the miserable thing it is today. What can you say now with disasters, natural and man-made, striking this country with even more wanton plenitude? Bwisit si Gloria? (Gloria brings bad luck?)
And evacuation is what’s happening to people of this country itself. To go by Pulse Asia’s latest survey, 3 out of 10 Filipinos now want to evacuate from this country. Or specifically 32 percent, which is close to a third of the population wanting to leave the country. It was 1 out of 5 (19 percent) or close to a fifth of the population only a few years ago. The stated reason for this massive threatened evacuation was not unlike the unending war between Arabs and Jews and the impending explosion of Mayon Volcano. Most Filipinos felt threatened in their own country. They were fleeing for dear life, or wanted to.
Specifically, more than half of Filipinos no longer felt hopeful about their country. The number of Filipinos who still felt hopeful fell from 69 percent in July last year to only 49 percent this year. At the time Pulse Asia took this survey, the newspapers had carried the following headlines: the impeachment cases filed against GMA, including that of a bishop (Deogracias Iñiguez), GMA’s declaration of “all-out war” against the NPA, the abolition of the death penalty, the probable filing of impeachment charges against Comelec commissioners, and the capture of six Magdalo officers.
Clearly, most Filipinos did not find the idea of GMA attempting to crush the communist and military rebellion a source of elation. They found it a source of dismay—or even more reason not to hope.
Misery the GMA government did not invent, but hopelessness it did, and does. The misery has been there for a long, long time. The sense that this country has no future, that the only way out is out, is new. Gaze at the plight of Filipinos today: being evacuated from Lebanon, being evacuated from Mayon, wanting to be evacuated from their own country. And we thought the Jews were the people condemned to wander the earth forever in search of a home!
I don’t know though why more and more of us think the solution to the current hopelessness is to evacuate to foreign, or indeed hostile, shores. The solution in fact is so much simpler, less expensive and longer lasting. That is to remove the source of hopelessness. A people can have no hope when they are being led by someone they never gave their consent to. A country has no hope when it is being turned into a “killing fields” by someone whose crown sits uneasily on her head. A nation has no hope when honesty, justice and decency become crimes and lying, cheating and stealing become presidential virtues. Remove the source of those things and hope will gush from the heart of this land overnight, like oil being struck in the arid deserts of Arabia.
We Filipinos have always prided ourselves on our ability to come together and rise to heroic heights when confronted by a common threat. Our compatriots are threatened with mortar fire in Lebanon and we all come together to do our bit to help them. Our compatriots are threatened with volcanic fire in Albay and we all come together to do our bit for them. We are all threatened by hellfire right where we are, and all we can do is think, each man for himself the devil take the hindmost or last one to catch the boat to America?
Gaze at the state of the nation: Evacuation.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=15081
Evacuation is what’s happening to the OFWs in Lebanon, for the most part maids, many of whom are back home richer only in experience—of the harrowing kind. They are impoverished otherwise, having managed to scramble to safety only by the skin of their teeth, bringing home only the pasalubong of being alive. My heart went out to that mother who was sobbing over her daughter, her youngest, who was being wheeled out of the airport, the girl’s body broken and bruised after leaping out of a building to escape a master who refused to let her go. The mother was thankful her daughter had at least come home breathing, and kept vowing that, money or no money, she wasn’t ever going to let her go back abroad. I wondered how long her vow would hold.
Evacuation is what’s happening in Albay in the areas around Mayon Volcano. Mayon is threatening to blow its top once more, thick smoke billowing out of its crater of late, the roiling magma underneath pushing upward demanding to be released. Many folk have already packed up their belongings and gone to evacuation centers. Some others refuse to go. As one woman—who was coolly pedaling her sewing machine while all the fuss was going on around her—put it, why should she? They were already used to Mayon threatening to blow. If worst comes to worst, they could always run away. They were confident they could outrun Mayon’s fury. It was the story of their life: outrunning life’s volcanic explosions.
It’s not altogether hard to understand the reticence to go. It’s precious little choice dying instantaneously from molten fire or in slow-motion from losing one’s livelihood. As far as I know, few people in this country really die from being swallowed up by onrushing burning rock. The casualties pile up more from the effects of the volcanic explosions, as in Pampanga, when lahar and mudslides came to quite literally bury the hopes and dreams of thousands of farmers.
I remember that when natural disasters struck in great plenitude during Cory’s time, folk began to whisper, “Malas si Cory.” (Cory is unlucky) Life wasn’t at all that hard at the time—certainly it wasn’t the miserable thing it is today. What can you say now with disasters, natural and man-made, striking this country with even more wanton plenitude? Bwisit si Gloria? (Gloria brings bad luck?)
And evacuation is what’s happening to people of this country itself. To go by Pulse Asia’s latest survey, 3 out of 10 Filipinos now want to evacuate from this country. Or specifically 32 percent, which is close to a third of the population wanting to leave the country. It was 1 out of 5 (19 percent) or close to a fifth of the population only a few years ago. The stated reason for this massive threatened evacuation was not unlike the unending war between Arabs and Jews and the impending explosion of Mayon Volcano. Most Filipinos felt threatened in their own country. They were fleeing for dear life, or wanted to.
Specifically, more than half of Filipinos no longer felt hopeful about their country. The number of Filipinos who still felt hopeful fell from 69 percent in July last year to only 49 percent this year. At the time Pulse Asia took this survey, the newspapers had carried the following headlines: the impeachment cases filed against GMA, including that of a bishop (Deogracias Iñiguez), GMA’s declaration of “all-out war” against the NPA, the abolition of the death penalty, the probable filing of impeachment charges against Comelec commissioners, and the capture of six Magdalo officers.
Clearly, most Filipinos did not find the idea of GMA attempting to crush the communist and military rebellion a source of elation. They found it a source of dismay—or even more reason not to hope.
Misery the GMA government did not invent, but hopelessness it did, and does. The misery has been there for a long, long time. The sense that this country has no future, that the only way out is out, is new. Gaze at the plight of Filipinos today: being evacuated from Lebanon, being evacuated from Mayon, wanting to be evacuated from their own country. And we thought the Jews were the people condemned to wander the earth forever in search of a home!
I don’t know though why more and more of us think the solution to the current hopelessness is to evacuate to foreign, or indeed hostile, shores. The solution in fact is so much simpler, less expensive and longer lasting. That is to remove the source of hopelessness. A people can have no hope when they are being led by someone they never gave their consent to. A country has no hope when it is being turned into a “killing fields” by someone whose crown sits uneasily on her head. A nation has no hope when honesty, justice and decency become crimes and lying, cheating and stealing become presidential virtues. Remove the source of those things and hope will gush from the heart of this land overnight, like oil being struck in the arid deserts of Arabia.
We Filipinos have always prided ourselves on our ability to come together and rise to heroic heights when confronted by a common threat. Our compatriots are threatened with mortar fire in Lebanon and we all come together to do our bit to help them. Our compatriots are threatened with volcanic fire in Albay and we all come together to do our bit for them. We are all threatened by hellfire right where we are, and all we can do is think, each man for himself the devil take the hindmost or last one to catch the boat to America?
Gaze at the state of the nation: Evacuation.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=15081
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