Torment for Our Own Good

The Sinulog festivity this year is supposedly going "hi-tech", with the passes for the main event being chip-encrypted bracelets instead of ID cards. At the same time, the geniuses in government are talking about shutting down cell sites during the festival for security reasons. "Hi-tech" my ass. A cellphone isn't the only way to trigger a bomb and a bomb isn't the only way to do violence as the truck attacks in Europe show. But sure, let's shut down a vital service which would, in all likelihood, hamstring the police force just as well as it would inconvenience the local populace. The terrorists win without even having to do anything.

Thinking about this proposed measure had me thinking about how the government always seems to take the most insensitive, uncreative and clumsy measure to solve problems. Many years ago, there was a spike in the amount of murders committed by assassins riding in tandem on motorcycles. Enough people complained about the rising pile of dead bodies that the government finally felt compelled to do something. The brilliant solution proposed? Ban motorcycle helmets. The way our masters explained it is that since the murderers could no longer hide their faces, they would be more easily identified and caught. Where does one even begin to explain how stupid the idea was? Not all people who ride motorcycles are assassins. They have to know that, right? They have to know that people need to wear helmets to not die in accidents, right? Oh, they went further. They seriously considered banning people from riding in tandem altogether. You better not have a wife or any friends. It's for security purposes you see.

Fortunately, good sense prevailed. Instead of banning helmets, they only banned those which cover your face! So if you ever get in an accident, make sure you fall in the correct angle like a good citizen. Compromising the safety of everyone is necessary to lessen the risk of a statistically tinier percentage off people getting shot. The murders still happen anyway because the assassins, shockingly, don't obey the restriction. The terrorists win without even having to do anything. As for the ban on riding in tandem, only a few places have ordinances against that and even then it's not enforced because it's impossible and stupid.

The takeaway from these examples is that whenever the government is faced with a problem, their first instinct is to either impose restrictions or take away freedoms that the Filipino people enjoy. The demand is always for the long-suffering peasant to suffer even more for his own good. The attitude of our leaders is power-centric, not people-centric. Ours is a heavy-handed state. Instead of exploring options that would be least intrusive to the daily life of the citizen, the option that is most intrusive, and often the easiest, is taken. Police power is brute force and brute force requires little thought. Thinking is hard and nobody has the patience for that, least of all politicians.

Just think of any problem in society, how the government plans to tackle it and you'll realize I'm correct. Look at Manila, my favorite example of piss-poor urban planning and mismanagement. The traffic situation is apocalyptic. What's the government's solution? Does it invest in road-widening or new infrastructure? Does in invest in mass transit or expanding the rail system it has? No. The solution they went with years back is some cockamamie scheme wherein if your car has a certain number on its license plate, you can't drive it on some arbitrarily designated weekday. What a joke. What are they cooking up now? More arbitrary number schemes? Color? A ban on cars?

Drug menace? Just shoot 'em. The safety and security of the country demands it! Again, insensitive, uncreative and clumsy measures first. Power-centric, not people-centric. A million is a statistic. Etc, etc. Do you see it now?

I wouldn't be surprised if the government's solution to poor healthcare is to pass a law making it illegal to be sick. 

Happy New Year?

"Happy new year!", huh? Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Happy? I guess we'll just see about that.

Who knows what'll happen, really. Some freak earthquake could kill us all in any moment. Maybe we could contract a terminal illness. A stray bullet could do you in. Who knows? Might as well go on pretending like it's going to be peaches and cream.

Maybe it isn't what we know but what we'll do about it.

Transit

The most annoying thing about the holidays is the endless stream of news reports about how a lot of people are going home to their families. You have riveting news reports about people getting on boats.

So?

If you live in the Philippines, you know what I mean. I get why media devotes time talking about travel. The Philippines is an archipelago so people naturally travel a lot. But it seems to me like a whole load of nothing. People are getting on a bus. Wow.

Geez.

The Others

One day, a strange man came into our office. He was dressed like a soldier but clearly wasn't one. He wore no badge of rank or insignia of any of the armed forces. He was visibly uncomfortable, taciturn and whatever little he spoke was barely audible. Despite this, the man was in some position of authority for he was sent to record court proceedings between two particular parties that he was associated with. Video recordings aren't allowed in court which is why he was sent to the office. The Clerk had to make sure the man deleted the offending video.

I learned that the man and the two parties were "Lumad" or indigenous folk. Apparently, they have their own pseudo-government to which the tribesmen owe loyalty to. The strange man was a member of their own police force. He had no weapons, or at least none that we could see. These folk are a society operating within a society. I heard that their government even issues licenses for various things. Lumad folk are often shocked when they discover their "motorcycle licenses" count for nothing when they get caught by the national police.

Compared to the other mini-societies in the Philippines, the Lumad are small-time. At the other end of the scale are the full blown insurgencies such as the various Muslim groups down south (take your pick). Now those ones have no problem gunning down any soldier or lawman that dares step into their "territory." Some parts of the Philippines are completely out of the government's control as the infamous SAF massacre in Maguindanao would demonstrate.

It's disturbing that there are people running around the country that consider themselves first as something other than Filipino. Healthy societies shouldn't have this problem. However, the mentality is understandable and the cause for this is due to yet another piece of historical baggage weighing the country down.

There was no "Filipino people" before the Philippines. When the Spanish arrived, they took a bunch of islands and called it a country. That's it. There were no cultural considerations, only conquest. You could call the Philippines a mistake once you realize how arbitrary its composition is. The result was that you have a whole bunch of people divided by ethnicity, language and religion forced together because the winds happened to blow the Spanish galleons a particular direction. It sounds like the premise of a bizarre reality TV show but it's never funny when the shooting starts.

That's why we have a bunch of people constantly screaming for "autonomy". It's no surprise that you have groups like the Bangsamoro, MILF, BIFF, BLT or whatever new alphabet soup organization that just stumbled out of the jungle. Blood and religion is always going to be more important to people than a decree by some distant government that we belong to some nebulous group. The desire for federalism is motivated by a similar sentiment although at least it would be a legal solution. Yet, the threat of separatism is ever present.

The most important thing to know about these groups is that they don't care about the Philippines. The only thing they do care about however, is the generous aid we keep sending them. "Filipino" is irrelevant and meaningless to these people. If they could cast off the country like a rotten cloak, they would. When the government starts talking about the latest "peace deal" they've been hammering out with the separatists, the deal is probably a scam in which the country gives up everything for the promise of "peace". They're not interested in "fair" and will give up nothing. They've already won and just want to make it official.

It will all crumble in the end. 

11/2/2017

These past few months haven't been so great. I haven't felt good in a while and I've been gripped by a foul ennui that I can't think straight. But I should write something. I wouldn't want to disappoint my handful of readers.

Must it be politics again?

Shobaleader One - Cooper's World

Squarepusher - Stor Eiglass