Humps and human development

One waits for a TV or radio program where the intelligent-looking guest is asked by the good-looking host, "In which city do you find the most number of humps for any given stretch of road? What is the name of this city better known as the hump capital of the world?"

For a million or two million depreciated pesos, even a self-respecting Metro Manilan might be tempted to forget about his public shame and thus acknowledge his own city as Ripley’s probable record holder.

In Metro Manila, humping is a universal way of life. Metro Manilans – male or female, college-graduate or elementary school drop-out, rich or poor – must detest humpless streets as much as nature supposedly abhors a vacuum.

In the poorest areas of the city, the only parts where one misses humps are precisely where no streets exist. As soon as these places experience some degree of material improvement and streets are built, the most obvious and infallible indicator of trumpeted progress is the existence of humps. Most of the time, they are jolting reminders of how engineering must be constrained by economics in areas that desperately try to keep up appearance. No fancy frills are expected nor are they to be found in these poor man’s humps. All one gets is abrupt reality checks punishing a vehicle’s suspension and cutting short the life of its shock absorbers.

The story is different in other areas of Metro Manila. In the almost affluent and in the most exclusive subdivisions, gentler and therefore more expensive, more conscientiously painted-up humps – yellow or white appears to be the color of choice – intimately bond with their ever-accommodating streets. Life in these sheltered and blue-guarded subdivisions is much kindier and their humps reflect the fact. They are gentle carry-over humps, very much unlike those in the less fortunate "villages" that can only serve body-jolting bumps.

There appears to be no natural defense against this epidemic of humps. Reason itself seems unable to hold its own in the face of their onslaught. In the presumed formal abode of institutional reason – in those institutions of higher learning considered to be so vital as to warrant explicit constitutional protection – humps take precedence over reason.

In the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines – the country’s premier educational institution – the life of the mind and reason are regulated forcefully by humps and those that benefit from humping this venerable university. An academic community whose "higher learning" should enable its members to be guided by what reason indicates for efficient vehicular and pedestrian traffic, hardly any one appears bothered by the formidable array of humps on campus. Professors, students, drivers of all sorts, women just as well as men, Catholics as well as Protestants, Muslims and animists, even the atheists do not see the absurdity of a university campus where physical humps rather than rational minds define what UP traffic must be.

Perhaps it is inevitable and just as well that humps rule the UP too. After all, hardly anyone here really stops at stop signs. Mostly everyone driving a vehicle or on foot feels competent to gauge the redness of any red light and therefore to stop before it, walk through it or simply make a run for it.

In UP, even religion does not assist reason enough to make the latter the arbiter of traffic that it must be. UP’s Catholic Chapel has facsimiles of tablets on which the Lord’s Commandments are listed and they are placed on one side of the street just before one enters the church. On the other side of this same street is a prominent sign heralding its being one way and announcing that entry from the wrong end is forbidden. Highly-educated, well-dressed people park their new model cars and vans immediately before the commanding tablets, in full view of the prohibitory sign or – on the other side of the street – right below and before the traffic sign, in full view of the religious tablets as they rush to worship their Lord. They enter the street the wrong way, park their vehicles the wrong way and then they would praise the Lord the right way! (Our energetic parish priest might do well to run after this kind of people too. They are certainly just as bogus in their religious claims as Jose Velarde was in his financial statements.)

A plethora of humps cannot possibly contribute to a mind set functional for our time and age. Amidst globalization, with technologies that compress both space and time, with productive competitiveness being required of nations and citizens, an orientation limiting itself to physical resources and recognizing only the cruder laws of physics is hopelessly jurassic. Humps invariably keep people from relying more on reason and developing the compassion for others that reason facilitates. They slow us in our efforts to realize our vast potentials for human development.

The 21st century’s message for those who would develop cannot be clearer. To develop faster, you must stop all these humping.