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Tuesday?s United States elections, we?re told, fractured almost every other record in the books: from voter turnout, to youth and ethnic mix of electors, to cost.
?The Internet and cell phones were leveraged in ways never imagined before,? the Washington Post observed. But a blue card flashed at Barack Obama rallies probably summed up the core issue: ?Change.?
?If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading,? the Chinese sage Lao Tze wrote 2,600 years back. Midway in the campaign, John McCain heeded Lao Tze: He, too, stood for ?change.?
Exclude hermetically sealed North Korea. And scrub paranoid Burma. The rest of the world got from this poll a cyberspace tutorial on ballot power. ?Man?s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,? theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said. But ?man?s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.?
Media showed us, in real time, people queuing for hours to dust off unused tools for keel-hauling government. Americans were appalled by the greed of their super rich. Chief executive officers bailed out with ?golden parachutes? after bankrupting their companies. They erupted when avarice chewed into their home mortgages, retirement egg nests, jobs and healthcare.
Americans ?accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia or the irksomeness of change,? JusticeLearned Hand once said.
?Tama na,? Filipinos say. ?Sobra na. Palitan na.? Sometimes, we call that ?People Power.? And when we switch off US elections coverage, our problems ? which demand radical recasting ? crouch there.
Take hunger. It spins off into premature graves for infants, school dropouts, tuberculosis and other health problems ? even insurgency. ?There are sharp elbows attached to hungry stomachs.?
Some 3.3 million Filipino families went hungry, at least once, in the last three months, Social Weather Stations (and Inquirer columnist) Mahar Mangahas reports. Some families ate only rice with salt. Hunger bit most sharply in Metro Manila. There, at least 500,000 families lacked food, says the World Food Day survey by Gallup International-Voice of the People 2008.
?When hunger strikes, the poor pull in their belts by another notch,? the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali once observed. ?The rich rearrange their menus.?
The President ordered the release of emergency doles. That?s fine as it goes. Hunger, however, does not just stem from lack of food. But the poor lack either resources to produce it or money to buy it.
Handouts are a placebo. They duck the basic issue: the stranglehold on resources by top officials and ?an anarchy of families,? as author Alfred McCoy put it. Their capture of bureaucracy stymies structural reforms.
This administration is corrupt. But so is the opposition. Arroyo is no better or worse than Estrada. Both clone Ferdinand Marcos before them. And what differentiates Imelda Marcos from Mike Arroyo? No one is keen on change, only on clinging to pelf and power.
The names of their exiles may differ. El mismo per con differente colar (Same mongrel, different collar). When People Power erupted, Fabian Ver and Eduardo Cojuangco squeezed into Marcos? escape helicopters. Soldiers stopped Estelito Mendoza at the airport.
Jaime Dichavez, Dante Tan, Lucio Co and Yolanda Ricaforte scrammed when People Power II chased Erap out. They left no forwarding addresses. Panfilo Lacson?s trusted cops ? Michael Ray Aquino and Cesar Mancao ? skipped town to duck questioning on publicist Bubby Dacer?s murder.
?Joc-Joc? Bolante is a prototype for future exiles of the Arroyo regime. He clung to his US jail until deported. Today, Bolante uses peptic ulcers to dodge Senate grilling on the fertilizer scam. Nobody is fooled.
Joseph of Scriptures showed there?s no alternative to a country raising its own food. Using food imports as a crutch, over prolonged periods, isn?t a viable policy option. ?Dependence on others brings a perpetual fast,? Asian farmers say.
?The unfulfilled promise of food still lies in the tropics,? the Food and Agriculture Organization?s director general said at the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture in Los Baños. ?These areas could be the food granaries of the future?. But hunger exacts its highest tool in this very zone?.Human life here is often ?nasty, brutal and short.??
Ignored promises, however, are often withdrawn. BBC reports that the new ?Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity? study forecasts: ?Current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by about 7% by 2050?. Damage to forests, rivers, marine life and other aspects of nature could halve living standards for the world's poor.?
Natural systems that produce food are being savaged. Half the wetlands have disappeared over the past century. A third of coral reefs are in ruins. There?s been a sharp decline in ocean fish stocks. ?Species loss is estimated between 100 and 1,000 times the rate that would occur without 6.5 billion humans on the planet.?
Isn?t that a mirror image of crumbling Philippine ecosystems? Only 18 percent of the country has forests left. Soil in about 70 percent of a province, like Cebu, is eroded. Vital mangroves have been recklessly cut, coral reefs decimated.
?It?s not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change,? the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin once said. If the hat fits us, we wear it.
