This type of hurricane is a very strong tempest, so many and so strong hitting these islands that neither Virgil nor Ovid nor any other poet I have read can describe its destructive power. These occur very often and we suffer so much, that even after experiencing them, it is difficult to believe these can happen. —F. I. Alzina, a Jesuit missionary in the Philippines, 1668 Those who suffered supertyphoon Odette the past days, or other typhoons, feel the same way as that poor missionary did three centuries ago. Nothing has changed. The most sadistic of gods situated the Philippines quite precisely in that part of this vast planet where typhoons are an annual nightmare. The archipelago is in a tropical zone facing the Pacific Ocean, whose vast waters and whose temperature of 26°C and above generates the huge volume of water vapor that rises and condenses at the higher, cooler altitude to form the stuff of storms. The so-called Coriolis effect, or the deflective impact of the Earth’s rotation on moving bodies, turns storms into typhoons, as it magnifies wind speeds to destructive power. If the Philippines were just located several degrees lower or nearer the equator where the Coriolis effect is weaker, we wouldn’t—like Indonesia and even the southern Mindanao region—be hit by the destructive typhoons of Luzon and the Visayas. Typhoon tracks (5 years): PH smack in the middle (untouched part on equator) Typhoon tracks (5 years): PH smack in the middle (untouched part on equator) And finally, together with Japan’s Kyushu and Shikoku islands, our most populated and biggest island Luzon is the first landmass to be hit by typhoons generated in the Pacific Ocean, if the same Coriolis effect does not deflect them northward. The Sierra Madre mountain range is too low to form a wall to weaken the typhoons rushing from the Pacific. Check out the so-called typhoon tracks for two decades made by meteorologists: Our country is smack in the path of the typhoons generated in the Pacific, at the rate of about 20 per year. The fact that this archipelago has been so typhoon-ravaged, reported by missionaries as early as the 17th century, and the absence of fabled kingdoms of gold here such as there were in South America explains why we are so deeply Catholic. With Islas de las Filipinas being so distant, and so typhoon-ravaged, few conquistadores and Spanish soldiers volunteered to go or be assigned to these godforsaken islands. They preferred the nearer Latin America, where Aztec and Mayan gold had been found and seized by famous conquistadores. What could the clever Spanish Crown do to maintain its frontier outpost in the Pacific, a stepping-stone to the rich kingdoms of China and Japan? They rounded up as many clerics as they could, so rather than through swords, which were lacking as most of them were in South America, the natives could be pacified by fear of the Cross. Rather than real events, they made up the story of rulers like Rajah Humabon miraculously being converted to Catholicism right after the conquistadores and their friars set foot on their kingdoms. The story is actually an exposition of the Spanish colonizers’ strategy for subjugating the islands. The reality most probably is that due to a Filipino character flaw that afflicts us to this day, one ruler would deviously ask the conquistadores to help him annihilate the other ruler nearby so he could seize his wealth and land. After their initial divide-and-rule strategy though, there was a vast archipelago to be ruled, and lacking enough soldiers, the Spanish Crown relied on Catholic religious orders, escorted by only a few armed soldiers, to conquer the islands. It even cleverly pitted the competing religious orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans and Capuchins versus the Jesuits, against each other, telling one order that if they wouldn’t send enough clerics, the other order would dominate Islas de la Filipinas, and they wouldn’t want that. The prize dangled before them was not just this archipelago but those two rich pagan civilizations further north: China and Japan. These Islas would be their base camp, as it were, for their religious invasion of those two nations. Not only as a physical base but a place where they could brainwash the naïve natives to become not only the porters and servants they needed in their expeditions but also proselytizers–catechists they were called, as Pedro Calungsod allegedly was—since even the Catholic orders could not get enough of their priests to venture into the Far East. And what would their “brainwashing machines” be? The educational institutions they set up, among them the University of Santo Tomas (the oldest Catholic university in Asia) by Dominicans, the Ateneo de Manila by the Jesuits, and the network of seminaries in the provinces to which Filipinos even of grade-school age were sent to. These institutions also provided enough clerics to support the Spanish friars deployed throughout the archipelago to convince the natives that they were not being subjugated by a foreign power. Rather they should be thankful that they were being put under the wing of the Holy Mother Church, so their souls would be saved from eternal fire. Even the Filipino term bayan referred originally not really to nation but to the town, which emerged initially not as a consequence of trading but as a result of households congregating—often under orders of the colonizers—around the church built by the friars, which was their base of operations. Even today, the center of most municipalities is the church, with the munisipyo just nearby. Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo were so powerful in rousing Filipinos to revolution because these very accurately depicted the religious infrastructure of Spanish colonialism. We all remember Padre Damaso. Who remembers the Spanish military ruler in those novels? The churches in even the remotest province were built of stone, and in the most durable way not only—as in the cathedrals of Europe—to glorify God. They also had a military function, as impregnable forts in the frontiers, in case the natives resisted the Spanish colonizers or revolted against them, which happened not too rarely. They were also an indestructible refuge during typhoons. Can you imagine the impact in the consciousness of the naïve natives, when the friars took them into their churches to save their lives? There is nothing like a typhoon to instill the fear of God in pre-scientific people. Thus, for four centuries it was really not the Spanish Crown and its military that ruled the islands but the Catholic Church. No wonder that to this day, after the family, most Filipinos identify themselves not as members of their immediate community or of the nation but as members of the Congregation of God, in its original Filipino usage, sambayanan, from samba (worship) and bayan (town). It has therefore been so easy for Filipinos to be uncaring what happens to the nation and so easy to leave it, just as long as they go to Church every Sunday. Steal from the state’s coffers, just make sure you finance some Church project. * * * But that is history. And we will still suffer typhoons, unless our archipelago is transferred somewhere else on the planet. It brings on so much destruction, and I suspect it is another major disincentive for crucial foreign investments. But there are nations that were defined by how they deal with their unlucky geography. For instance, the Netherlands, with 70 percent of its land either below or barely a meter above sea level, has created an awesome system of dikes. Japan has created awesome building technology and rescue infrastructure to deal with earthquakes, which devastate even its richest cities. I would like to offer a concrete proposal. Enact a law mandating Pagcor and PCSO to set aside, say, 20 percent of their income to a fund to build infrastructure (hundreds of huge water-pumping stations?) that can prevent and contain floods and provide the necessary equipment for rescue operations (hundreds of amphibian trucks? typhoon and flood shelters?). Or maybe take advantage of the public outrage over lawmakers’ pork barrel and devote the P25 billion annual allocation to build this infrastructure, so that we wouldn’t be thrown into national depression every year during the typhoon season. tiglao.manilatimes@gmail rigobertotiglao and trigger.ph
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 18:22:21 +0000
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