‘The story of our benighted lives. An economy driven by little else but rent.’

Where do we go from here?

CLEARLY, Ondoy and Pepeng delivered a message to us all – we’ve been doing things the wrong way.

We’ve despoiled the environment. From the time of our forefathers, we slowly but surely cut our forests, and the remaining timber stand is an awful shame. When I was in my teens, we would visit the newly-acquired farm in Davao City after a long drive from Butuan City. Then you saw in the mountains of Agusan del Sur and Davao del Norte (now divided in two) what Longfellow called "forest primeval". It rained in Davao each afternoon till early evening. It wasn’t like Ondoy’s waterfall. It was like the steady pitter-patter of refreshing raindrops that almost invariably began between three and four and ended just before dinner would be served. The pitter-patter passed in rivulets through the downspouts of every roof, and into a waiting galvanized iron water tank. That was more than enough for tomorrow’s needs. So much so that not until Luis Santos became mayor after his stint as a tough police chief, did Davaoenos realize that water could not be so crudely sourced from raindrops. They then piped in water from Dumoy in Toril district. By the time the water supply system was set up, the afternoon rains ceased to become a predictable, daily occurrence. The forests were gone.

The first time I crossed from Marikina thence Antipolo into Tanay was when I visited the detained President Erap in his lovely mansion in its foothills. Where Antipolo blends into the foothills of Sierra Madre, you saw stretches of rolling slopes and deep gullies, small valleys with hardly any creek. All the hills and gullies were bald, covered with the hardy cogon that our forefathers used to roof their abode with, now seen only in the resorts of Boracay and Palawan. As you passed these bare patches of land, you ask yourself when their trees were cut --- Quezon, Roxas-Quirino, Magsaysay, Garcia, Macapagal, and beyond? The way the topsoil has been rendered so thin and useless even the hardy ampalaya and talong would find little soil to grow upon, these hills must have been raped before the Pacific War.

Did the waters that swelled the Marikina River last September 26 come from these bald patches of parch? Or further beyond, from the equally bald patches of land in Bulacan, save for some second-growth forests in Angat and La Mesa?

But most of the bare land is now populated – subdivisions of the upwardly mobile dot the landscape. The new Marikina? one would ask if you pass that way again, post-Ondoy’s nightmare. But aren’t these public lands? They used to be, until the politicians and the retired generals took over, somehow applying for patents, later turned into titles. Would these be better off now as relocation areas for the informal settlers who have made Laguna de Bay both habitat and toilet? Ask Jun Palafox. Then ask how government could retrieve what never should have been given to freeloaders.

It is the same wherever you go in this benighted land. What is the provenance of land ownership? Before the white-skinned conquistadores came to these shores, all land was communal, with authority over its use supervised by a datu or village elder, however they may have been called by the different tribes that populated these islands. Then the Royal Crown of Madre España deemed it best to transform choice and fertile valleys to its favorites. Thus was born "la hacienda," vast tracts of land cultivated by the brawn of Indios for the insulares, later the peninsulares. And the haciendas were passed from generation to generation, sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse. Long have the peninsulares disappeared from the landscape, and many have transformed the hacienda’s benefits into buildings in Ayala Avenue, and Ortigas and wherever the sons and daughters of the more upwardly mobile Indios, now re-christened Filipinos, work. Their encargados, mostly from the yellow-skinned settlers who came from Amoy, in then far-away Cathay, have since become entrepreneurs, many now surpassing the wealth of the hacienderos because where the latter lived on herencia, the former grew by enterprise and acumen. Sometimes the more influential, the more well-connected of the sons and daughters of the encargados used their proximity to political power to get their hands on vast haciendas left by those who either decided to leave for Madre Espana when the Indios declared independence, or from the frailes whose "pious" possessions had to be sold. They were told by the new political elite where to buy, how to buy, even how to acquire assets using public monies guaranteed by the new "sovereigns." For a cut, naturalmente. In land or money, better both.

The story of our benighted lives.

Inherited wealth. An economy driven by little else but rent. Even the forests were converted into concessions aka Timber License Agreements, virtual authority to create wealth out of nothing other than influence and power. And who were these favored people? Why, the kin of the political warlords and overlords, but certainly. Many turned around, dealt with the children of the encargados, and merely exacted rent, also called "royalties" from cutting trees inside the forest concessions.

Meanwhile the children of the Indios were happy that public schools gave their successors something called "a future." Their sons and daughters became teachers, civil servants, private employees. And they moved from farm to city. Better lives, which soon became the envy of those whose sons and daughters had to continue working the farms, or fishing the then abundant seas. So these children of the yet provincial Indios swarmed into the city, Manila preferably, to seek a "future". And without land, with little wherewithal, with nothing but menial jobs to suffer for want of an acceptable "diploma," and little else but brawn to offer, they became the "informal settlers." And they multiplied and multiplied, because neither Church nor State taught them the economic advantages of smaller brood.

Soon enough, urban warrens grew in other parts – in Cebu, in Davao, in Iloilo, in Baguio, everywhere factories or shops were located, and every town grown bigger because votes were needed by the political overlords.

And only when an occasional Ondoy or Pepeng rampages through the over-wrought land do we begin to ask ourselves why so many lives have been lost, and so many properties have been destroyed. The answer, my friends, stares us in the face. But we are too weak to do anything about it. We are too myopic to think long and plan ahead. After the rains have stopped, we just move on. Move on --- to a future still uncertain, still as grim.

Where do we go from here?

Maybe there are answers we should leave our children to answer. Maybe we have imposed ourselves too much on them --- our inherited ways, our inherited "culture", our old mindsets.

Maybe they can provide the answers. Maybe they can think of solutions.

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Email address: banayo_at@yahoo.com
Blog: litobanayo.blogspot.com