In my column for Philstar Unblogged, I wrote of a certain sense of insensitivity for the flood and landslide victims at the eastern part of the Philippines, who suffered from great property losses and a loss of lives in the midst of abject poverty and the lack of help from those in the metropolis. Over at Tumblr, it unleashed the boogeyman some of us in the cities don’t like to hear at all: “imperial Manila.”
It rained hard for the very first time this year in Metro Manila this afternoon. But for our countrymen in the Bicol region and the Eastern Visayas, the New Year meant rains, landslides, and sleepless nights in the evacuation centers. Who knows what they’ll go home to when the rains subside and the landslides abate: probably more than just wet floors, and muddy tracks on the wall. Thousands of them have been evacuated. Some of them have already died under the mercy of La Niña.
Life’s not going to be easy for them, especially if you live in that part of the Philippines: the rim of the Ring of Fire, the provinces that suffer the brunt of typhoons and storm-fronts. Life isn’t easy for them, to begin with: some of the provinces most affected by the landslides and the torrential rains and flash-floods are among the poorest in the Philippines. Provinces like Southern Leyte, the Samar provinces, Quezon, and the Surigao provinces. Some of the provinces most affected by the calamity are among the ones most likely to be affected by nature’s dangers: Albay, the Caraga region, Leyte.
It’s easy to chastise religious ritual as irrational, and perhaps maybe it is. In India, for example, many of the faithful who pull the Juggernaut’s chariots are crushed by the massive wheels of the vehicle. In the Philippines, there are undercurrents of “progressive” atheism that dismiss the Nazareno feast as panata pinned by false hopes. Yet Enlightenment, brought about by the radical changes of the French Revolution, also brought with it something unreasonable: the guillotine.
There are as many reasons not to believe in God as there are reasons to believe in Him. Religion has sinned against humankind in harsher ways that man has sinned against whatever gods he believes in. Yet when the arguments against God result in petty, pseudo-intellectual arguments that rely more on wit than reason, one can’t help but be more averse towards the argument than the premise.
Buying shoes in the 20th century was nothing like the click-and-meet-up routines people do nowadays over on Facebook (for the love of Zuckerberg, please use Facebook Marketplace, don’t tag random people on pictures of discount Bangladeshi espadrilles).
It was as simple as going to a shoe store, say, Zenco Footstep, have your feet measured with decades-old foot-measuring boards made from iron, and then wait for the saleslady to do the old “size-seven-Tretorn-white-running-training-size-seven-size-seven” routine. The in-store music was piped in from an eight-track cassette of varied songs, from 80s “Sussudio” to 90s Keempee de Leon songs.
As if summoned by the arcane chants made over inverted microphones dangling from the rafters, the shoe box magically falls from the hole: size seven Treton white running/training shoes, if you ordered them.
The shoe is fitted, tested, wrapped, and the discount Rambo sandals thrown in. Like magic, so it seems.
Today it speaks of either technological backwardness or inventory efficiency, but nine-year-old me thought of things in terms of “The Shoemaker and the Elves.” I thought that the shoe store ceiling was a workshop of elven shoemakers that made the Bandolinos, the Kaypees, and the Reeboks.
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