February 2015
But aren't we STILL missing the bigger picture?
Words heated to red hot when China started reclamations on some atoll islands (called shoals, really).
When the Chinese started its clandestine incursions into some atoll islands geographically close to our shores, we immediately boiled up with passionate and nationalistic protestations about violations of our precious sovereignty, over some outcroppings of land in the vast expanse of the China Sea. Lands that probably have very little value for agriculture pursuits not only with regard to fertility but because of their miniscule sizes. Of course we may say that there is always the possibility that valuable mineral deposits could be found in those tiny dots of islands.
Or fishing rights that would be curtailed. But if they are close enough to our national boundaries, then can we not surmise that whatever they’d got there could also be possibly found where we are? Anyway, all these long years, what have we done in and about these suddenly now famous shoals? Nada.
Anyway, to this day this is a daily thorn in our national discourses which have of late then at helter-skelter. Heated words burned continue to spew out of the mouths of our government officials, the media, and from many of us.
Then picture the big and lush island of Mindanao, long heralded but neglected as the land of promise, a veritable goldmine of natural resources and vast fertile lands and valleys. And what do we do?
We want to slice and dice it so a good portion of it could be handed in a platter to a minority that has not much to show with regard to democratic governance, no worthy credentials to vouch for its financial cognitive abilities to manage an economy much less a complex political system, and that has always been regarded dating back to the Spanish times, through the American regime and as late as yesterday, as bellicose, troublesome, untrustworthy, and from past labored experiences as unfit for the rigors and demands of civilization.
Why, only last week or so our eschewed national discourses have suddenly been fused into one focal subject – the massacre of 44 of our elite policemen out to arrest a known international terrorist, a bomb maker responsible for the deaths of many innocents, domiciled and coddled right in the heart of the benighted place where some kind of a new state is supposedly to be constituted under some negotiated agreement with our duly-constituted government.
Anyway, while we hem and haw about some bleached shoals out there in the vast China Sea, our resource-rich Mindanao is laid waste with strife and neglect.
Shades of some forgotten facets of our history?
