let the law spark

After decades of silence, I decided to write for public consumption. Writing, of course, has been a daily dose for me. There are just too many legal briefs to prepare, and deadlines to beat. Lawyers do these for a fee, except in rare pro bono cases.

But lawyers too are citizens, as Manny Valdehuesa, a fellow columnist, aptly said. The practice of law is not a rehearsal of some sort that you can undo several times over. Whenever and wherever justice has failed, there are some innocent souls who languish in the damp and cold concrete prison cells, and the guilty ones who, having the financial resource, go scot-free. When this happens, a social fabric is torn apart. Society weakens.

Lawyers are not gladiators in court, to be paid handsomely if they fought well in battle. Law, to be a truly effective tool for social order and peace, requires competent and conscientious practitioners, people who advocate the higher ends of justice, sans the fee.

Definitely, we do not need the bearers of the law who are mum amid the spate of bribery in the justice system – in the law enforcement, in the prosecution, and yes, even in the bench. These are lawyers who are only up to fattening their pockets, a practice of law without a social conscience.

Look around. Even the blind could see, and even the deaf could hear the cries of injustice.

There is Taglimao, a barangay which is near the city proper in terms of distance but would take an hour to reach due to bad roads, roads which are fit for off-road racing. Do the city officials know that Taglimao is part of their governance? To make matter worse, the mostly unlettered residents are being harassed by barangay officials either by threat of bodily harm or legal suits. That is plain terrorism.

Does anybody know that within our protected watershed areas, there is a plan to construct a cassava processing plant which threatens our potable water with cyanide which is a by-product of cassava? Who will stop this incessant threat to our environment?

For the incompetence of the prosecution to smell the fabrication of a case, one Geronimo Banac was indicted for rape, jailed for seven years in Lumbia city jail, and finally acquitted and released for lack of evidence. Who will now compensate him for the loss of his dignity and sense of pride?

Take our lawmakers. They extended the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law up to June 30, 2009, with a condition: lands would be covered under agrarian reform voluntarily. They must be joking. No landowners, not even the church, would voluntarily give up their lands. Who will now fight for the cause of farmers who, in the language of then Raul Manglapus, “have been in the bondage of the lands they till”?

In a state of injustice, the bearers of the law must advocate, and fight ferociously as gladiators, in the court of justice, and in the court of public opinion as well. But unlike gladiators of old times, the lawyers should bear witness to truth, law, and justice, without expecting anything in return but the altruistic feeling that they too as citizens, have helped keep social order and communal peace.

There is a joke about lawyers. In the genesis story, God created the earth, and gave order to the universe. But before there was order, chaos presided. Lawyers, who preside on chaos, therefore must have preceded creation.

This is an unfortunate joke, a virtual verdict of the law practice in the Philippines.  True indeed, there are misfits within the ranks.  Go to Manila, and you see  lawyers who put up a small mobile office to solicit notarial services.  There are those who are retained by drug-lords and gambling lords and do no lawyering duties except negotiating for the release of drug pushers or gambling dens operators, and inevitably bribe government officials. Others still are bragging in public about their close relations with a fiscal, or a judge , and could therefore fix a case.

This kind of lawyering takes away the majesty of the law, the true and noble function of the law as instrument developed through social evolution.  Out of the chaotic earthly life, it is the law that gives order, through peace pacts among warring tribes, treaties among the present day states, and the civil and criminal laws within a nation. Take away the law, and true indeed, chaos will reign.

In a state of injustice, in the muddied waters of law and order, the law must spark; otherwise, we might go back to the evolutionary age when the fittest survive, and the weak, extinct. We would then be nothing but members of Darwin’s animal kingdom: less divine, more brutish.

In the new year 2009, let the law spark, within our hearts, specially in  the conscience of the bearers of the law.

menacing the ricefields: the golden “kuhol” story

It was in 1982, right after graduation in high school that I visited the school where I spent my primary education.  Right within the school playground was a small fishpond. I was curious why earth must be opened to give way  to fish, so I thought. Alas, what was cultured was not fish but a snail – apple snail which is locally known as golden “kuhol”.

Golden “kuhol”, scientifically known as pomacea canaliculata, was introduced  in the Philippines by no less than then First Lady Imelda Marcos, she who was tasked by the other half of the conjugal dictatorship, Ferdinand Marcos, to promote livelihood programs throughout the countryside.  The meat of the snail was reputed to be high in protein content which the impoverished Filipinos badly needed.

That was in 1982.  Even with much media hype, the snail did not find its way in the plates of the Filipinos. Poverty normally does not discriminate food on the basis of the palate. But not this one.  Hunger had to be suppressed than ingesting the slimy creature.  Poverty dehumanized people;  but even among the poor, there is still dignity left, a kind of self-respect that can choose death over eating the snail.

The golden “kuhol” remained a media hype, the project of Imelda Marcos that never was.

December of last year,  a sack of rice was within the P1,000.00 tag or around US$20.  The price of rice today has more than doubled.  Many have been queueing in market stalls just to buy cheap rice supplied by the government. Not only a few collapsed waiting for the long queues  to purchase five kilos of rice.

The Philippine government, to augment local supply, has to import rice from countries like Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand.  There is nothing really wrong with importation. In the now shrinking global village, exchange of goods is rapidly increasing. The international market is readily available.  

The storyline does not end here.  

Way back in the early 70’s, the International Rice Research Center (IRRI) was established in the Philippines, specifically in the University of the Philippines- Los Banos. Then, Philippines was second largest economy, in Asia and a net rice exporter.  The students from around Asia trooped to IRRI to learn modern techniques in rice production.

If  Filipinos taught the Asian neighbors the ways of rice farming, then it may be asked: Why then are we importing rice from these countries?  Is it the case of a novice learning more than the master?  This frankly boggles the mind.

Then, one day, my father-in-law asked me to buy pesticide.  That is insignificant request considering that every month, he supplies us with one sack of rice.  Abide I did.  To my surprise though, the pesticide he asked me to buy was precisely to kill golden “kuhol”.  When I held the bottle of pesticide, I was gripped with recollection of that time I saw the fishpond of golden “kuhol”.  The golden “kuhol” which was introduced to nourish the poor turned-out  to be the menace that stifled rice farming.

A single  golden “kuhol” can eat 7 to 24 seedlings a day and can consume one lettuce in one night.  With its peculiar rapid reproduction capacity, you can have millions of snails in your ricefield in varying stages of growth,  and even with the pesticides, the snails keep on reproducing.  This means I have to buy pesticides every planting season. But the severity of the problem is reflected when my father-in-law told me that more often than not, his expenses for rice farming exceed the value of the harvest considering the menace the golden “kuhol” has wrought.

Now I wonder if Imelda Marcos did take a bite of the snail when she launched the project. But that is a trivial matter.  On a serious note, we are actually having a peek of how not to govern.

connectivity

My physics teacher way back in high school, for all his antics, struck me with a realization when he exclaimed: “ An ocean is never the same when you drop a pebble”. He was explaining of course the principle of kinetic energy, that is, an object once in motion never stops until another object absorbs the energy. But the absorbing object gathers explosive energy that may later on translate into another form of energy, ad infinitum.

 

 

That was in 1982 then, when aside from tv, radio, game and watch, cinema, and betamax, we did not have any other optical entertainment. The Inconvenient Truth was still an idea but Al Gore did not have an idea that it would shape in a digitalized form. Then, the weather patterns were so regular that in the Philippines, rain was expected from June to February, and the leaves would fall early March presaging the summer heat of April and May. Lives and activities were then planned according to the weather patterns.

 

 

My physics teacher may have unwittingly nuanced his kinetic energy with the idea of connectivity, an inevitable interaction between man and nature, and amongst men.

 

 

For every boon there is the embryonic bane. The turbines which powered engines of trains and industries have propelled industrial revolution when civilization relied on synthetic products fashioned out of raw materials. Before the turbines, we had to hunt then cook the meat. Later, life is made convenient by processed meat, fast foods, machine-controlled temperature, etc.

 

 

Little did way realize, or shall we say, refuse to realize that for the convenience the inventions have offered us, a trade off with the environment is getting apparent. All through these years of seeming conveniences that we marvel, the atmosphere is thickened with particles, the ozone layer punctured, the seas littered with toxic wastes. In fine, for making our life easier than the hunting nomads, we sacrifice our environment, mother earth, which now threatens not only our way of life but life in general, with tsunamis, typhoons, dry spell, la nina and el nino. The notebook upon which I store my blog, and the cellphone that I use to greet my love ones, may make life here on earth meaningful, but years from now, when the batteries are drained, and the gadgets unusable, I would have to add, and this is ironic, to the threat of human extinction.

 

 

Connectivity. Everything, we do invariably affects the great cosmos. If we throw a pebble into the ocean, this is a connectivity which alters life and nature but does not really threaten earth and the earthlings. But threw a plastic in the ocean, in time, vulnerable sea creatures die, the fishermen lose their livelihood, their children, wallowing in poverty, migrate to the cities to become the scourges of urban living. And the government has to spend more for the policing of the cities, thereby draining financial resource which could have been well-spent in other productive ventures.

 

 

Logic 101 escapes me every time a head of state proclaims that the climatic changes do not threaten human existence. But the politicians, for their narrow vested interests, will always see white instead of black, wherever their interests would lead them. After all, between prostitutes and politicians, the only difference is the pursuit for power in the later, and the need to survive, in case of the former. But what is troubling is the pronouncement of some scientists, ( or pseudo-scientists?), that the environmental changes are not at all threatening. One may lack the scientific formulations, but at times, the basic form of knowledge, common sense, explains better than hypothesis and theorems. How else can you explain the respiratory diseases and allergies due to dust particles? Typhoon in the Philippines during the summer months of April and May? Inundation even for a moderate rainfall? If these scientists are the only ones to suffer the wrath of nature, one would not bother to raise an eyebrow for their “oh” very scientific conclusions. When the arguments become too complex, God beckons us to use common sense.

 

 

At another level of connectivity is in terms of human relation. In biblical sense, God is found in every man’s face, that we are all but manifestations of the divine, and hence, we are all members of the same family. But in these times, connectivity amongst men is shown with the information superhighway.

 

 

Information is a harbinger of change. During the cold war, the iron curtain was pierced with the shortwave radio broadcasting where liberal ideas were heard in communists areas. Years after, the liberal ideas became movements for change, and eventually, the overthrew of communist regimes from within. John Howard, the former Australian Prime Minister, was defeated due to two issues: environment and Iraq. Environmental issues henceforth will factor in elections of national leaders. As always, the battle starts in the mind, and the internet plays a major role in bringing a sea change in the way we treat the environment, and relate to fellow humans.

 

 

 

As I post this blog, like a pebble dropped in the ocean, its effects in the landscape of the human mind, may be precisely, only a pebble, hopefully not feeble. Yet, the energy of the pebble is unstoppable; it goes on ad infinitum.

Tags: environment, belonging, inconvenienttruth, internet, blogging, earth

Prev: 25 years hence, a reunion

scorching earth

My mother told me that when I was born, the wind was howling, the trees were dancing, the river was rising, and the sky celebrated my coming with thunder. That was how nature greeted me. My affinity with mother earth started since then. Even now, I prefer the pristine solitude of a roaring sea than the roar of an engine.

I was a September born when typhoon in the Philippines would normally hold sway, in a regular frequency, every year. Then, there was no need of a weather forecast to determine the coming monsoon, or the inter-tropical converging zone, or the super typhoon. Our folks would normally brace for bad weather during the months of July through February. The weather pattern was so regular that every body would qualify as weather forecaster.

But decades after, everything changed. Suddenly, we hear of typhoons in the summer months, during March to June when accordingly, the earth is closest to the sun, and when days are longer than nights. And these typhoons do not come in celebration of a birth, or of the dancing trees, but they bring mayhem and destruction, of landslides and floods. The folks would say, “There is calm after the storm.” That cliche is now untrue. “There is stench of death after a typhoon”.

And yes, there was this river, where our siblings, in moments of childish adventures, would escape from our house routines to swim in the then clear waters. We also then knew exactly what part of the river was the deepest that we had to avoid. We had the map of the river bed in our minds, thanks greatly to the absence of mud brought about by erosion of the mountain and siltation of the river. That river was a playground for kids, and a source of livelihood of the small fisherfolks. The last time I visited the river though, it has meandered, and almost dried up and floodied during typhoons. It has ceased to be a playground, and to be a source of living.

Every summer then, I looked forward to going my father’s hometown. Only half-kilometer from the town proper, were swamps and forests where birds, in varied colors and species, would chirp and glide near us that we could almost catch them, and clasp them in our young and innocent hands. There was this owl that I caught and kept, and when I lost it, I felt a part of me was taken away. But now, everytine I passed my father’s hometown, I am often caught in moments of nostalgia because the birds’ haven is now a sprawling brewery.

The earth I knew then is now a mere image in the memory screen of my mind, an image which I can only retell to my young kids as they play the latest computer games, with their eyes focused on the screen, and their consciousness utterly detached from the rest of the world. The better your focus and detached from your surrounding, the better a computer player you become. Ones expertise in the game is proportionate, in a way, to one’s detachment from the world. Such a tragic reality.

But as I look at my kids, I am almost tempted to tell them, that before, we used to play hide-and-seek with other kids under the moonlight, when the moon at night was so clear and bright, without the smog right above the canopy of the earth. Should I tell them play with the neighbors whom we don’t know? And where? In the concrete roads where the vehicles run as if there is no tommorow? Or in the bird’s haven which is now a brewery? Or should I let my children play under the rain as we used to when we were kids when I know that the rains now come with sulfur?

Yesterday, the news was flashed that in some cities here in the Philippines, the temperature rose to 39 degrees celsius, searingly hot for our national standards, the hottest in our recorded history. And yet, in this searing climate, we have at times, rain drops that would force us to stop our tennis games. Strange things are going on in this strange-filled environment.

In the name of development, humans have become predators of the earth that has nourished and sustained life. We cut trees to make houses, furnitures, skycrapers. We use plastics to package our fasfoods; batteries to power our cell-phones. We use fuel to transport. Hence, in proportion to our march to development, we destroy mother earth accordingly. In our attempt to seek shelter and to pamper us with the niceties of modern living, we have unwittingly destroyed the earth, the same earth that could unleash it’s fury through floods, tsunamis and earthqaukes. Paradoxically, in our attempt to shelter and enjoy the luxuries of life, we have caused the destruction of the greatest shelter – Mother Earth.

During our lawyer’s convention, there was this speaker who talked about environmental laws. To paraphrase, there is no sense saying there is income when you cut trees. If you cut a tree, it is converted into money, ostensibly to finance development. But when you cut the trees, you are warming the earth, you cause denudation which will trigger lanslides, and flash floods. In a way, if you cut a tree, you kill a human being who become mere statistics in times of calamity. The money you have earned for cutting a tree may not be enough to rehabilitate after a natural disaster.

I like the analogy used by Al Gore in his documentary, Inconvenient Truth. According to him, we are like a frog. We are in a bottle we call earth. It is getting warmer every day, but it does so slowly, and quite tolerably. But then later on, it might be too late for us to realize that it has become too hot for us to bear that we die without our knowing. But if the frog was from outside, when you dip it into a bottle with warm water, it will jump away to safety.

There may be truth to his analogy. But I don’t have to feel the earth getting warmer for me to realize that we are off to a serious climactic disaster. As a I look at the forest, it has ceased but a mount of rocks. There is no forest without trees. The river of my childhood has ceased to be playing ground. The bird’s haven is now a mass of concrete. As I look at my youngest kid playing Play Station, I wanted to tell him pick-up your trap and catch a bird? But where now should he catch a bird, or swim in a river, or play hide-and-seek? The paradise of my childhood have long gone, and what I have is only a memory. In a word, I don’t need Al Gore to tell me the Inconvenient Truth. The truth is not in the graph of temperature changes. The truth is most real and tangible in the life I have known and the difference in the life that my kid would have to live without.