Lessons from the past

As it has been our habit to read through every page and section of every newspaper we get to hold in our hands, we have ended up with information way out of our normal sphere of interest which is lifestyle, television, film, theater and entertainment. And quite often too, we find such information becoming the basis of a television series with a star and a villain, a doting mother of the star, and a stranger coming from out of nowhere to make things more interesting.

We recently read of Metro Manila making the headlines with the most number of squatters or illegal settlers should you prefer to call them that, with a record of 22.8 million with the numbers rising daily. The report listed down the Top 25 cities with extremely high homeless populations — Metro Manila, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Mexico City, Jakarta, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, Seattle, Athens, San Diego, Tampa Florida, Rome, Washington DC, Chicago, Tokyo, Baltimore, Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, Indianapolis, Denver and Lisbon.

We can only imagine the stories each family in each of these cities will tell. They can even cross borders and countries as in the case of one girl working as a domestic helper in Chicago, Illinois who went to visit relatives in Los Angeles, California and met a jobless Pinoy waiting for his acceptance as seaman on a ship. They got into a relationship without her knowing that the man had a family back home.

An even more interesting report claims that the names given to storms and hurricanes can be as exceedingly important as those given to one’s son or daughter. Female names are safer to adopt, says the report, since male names for storms are more likely to result in disaster. These claims sound like the invention of an active mind yet they are backed up by studies by experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as the University of South Carolina’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute.

Another entry is a report from Basco, Batanes where we had joined the late director Lino Brocka on a location hunting many light years ago. Beset by some 20 typhoons every year, the country’s northernmost islands then were reachable only during certain months, otherwise there was a danger of being stranded for months. It was Armida Siguion-Reyna who had succeeded in shooting a film in Batanes in 1991 titled Hihintayin Kita sa Langit based on the classic novel Wuthering Heights of Emily Bronte. It told of the love story starred in by Dawn Zulueta and Richard Gomez, set amidst the beauty of a location yet unknown to most.

Today, we read a sad report that the Batanes group of islands is no longer the unreachable beauty she was then. For the past 10 years, Batanes has not had a tropical storm and in its place commerce, agriculture and tourism have flourished. Provincial Environment and Natural Resources officer George Reyes reports that the situation has become “both a blessing and a curse.” It has led to dramatic changes in its people. While they used to plant root crops, today, they can actually plant rice and corn. The influx of tourists, and more and more flights have led to people buying goods from the mainland. This to us is tantamount to making Batanes and its people just like any other island on the archipelago. It is no longer special, the only one of its kind on the planet.

In ending this report, we can only quote from an essay written by Michael Kimmelman for the New York Times International Weekly decrying the lost city of Paris as photographed by Charles Marville, now drawing crowds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Much more than a validation of what used to be, it is a moving tribute to the past, to the Paris of Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, that writers including Hugo compare to the fallen city of Babylon, that can only bring tears to one’s eyes.             

(E-mail us your thoughts at [email protected] or text us at 0917-8991835.)