Notes from the North

By Estanislao Albano, Jr.

            My blood boils every time I hear or read the reasoning of the enemies of the efforts to  put under control the runaway population growth of this country which as things stand, is already the 12^th most populous country in the world despite its minuscule area. I just can’t understand why people would want to use their intelligence to make sure that in a few years, this country will sink under the weight of excess humans.

            Just look at the lady lawyer spokesperson of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines as though that group of noisy people still needs someone to do the speaking for them. During the Debate episode over Channel 7 tackling the two-child bill in Congress, she tried to sidestep the issue of overpopulation by saying that the cause of the hardships of this country is not too many mouths to feed but  unspeakable corruption in government. She calls herself a lawyer and she cannot even figure out that corruption in government is directly proportionate with the population. If the country has double the population it now has, corruption in government would be worse because there would be more people to steal and more people to steal for.

            In one gathering to express opposition to the bill and other bills on population which they perceive as anti-life, Manila Mayor Lito Atienza cited an alleged research finding that there are countries which experienced economic growth during surges in their population growths. That the mayor of a place where all the problems caused by overpopulation such as high crime rate and polluted environment should ever open his mouth against attempts to curb the population growth is already indication enough that there is failure of reason in the man. By the way, Manila is not only overpopulated with humans but with colored giant photos of its mayor.  

            Atienza failed to consider that if that were true with the country, we would have progressed long time ago because our population has been growing by leaps and bounds for decades now. What has been happening here is that we are not moving forward because of the too many mouths to feed and too many bodies to clothe and shelter and send to school. Atienza also failed to take into account that the Philippines is not in the league and mold of countries like the United States and Singapore where the baby booms meant growth in the economy. To begin with, it can be presumed that all those babies were made by productive citizens in enviable economic situations unlike here where most of the babies are born in sub-human conditions. Does the mayor think that making babies in the squatter areas a prelude to improvement in the economy? 

            But the allegations of Fr. Emeterio Barcelon in his column “Voice from the South” in the Manila Bulletin March 5,2004 takes the cake. He mentioned some statistics which tended to show that the population growth is not really as rapid and alarming as pictured by the advocates of population control. I do not know why statistics should still be cited when we see all those people living under bridges, sleeping on the sidewalks, selling their vital organs so they could continue to live their miserable lives.

            He also cited that the population density of the Philippines is only 252 per square kilometer while Japan and Singapore which have 336 and 6,499 are encouraging their people to have more babies. The priest seems to think that the population as against the area is the only consideration in determining if a country is overpopulated or not. He does not understand that overpopulation means having more people than what present resources and the economy can support. In the eyes of this priest and his fellow pro-population explosion advocates, the Sahara Desert is underpopulated because no one lives there.

            According to Fr. Barcelon, the real danger is not population explosion but population implosion or population decline which he said is happening in 87 countries at the moment. The priest does not again understand that the population explosion will not happen in one big bang for the whole world. Rather, it’s like cooking popcorn. The corn do not pop simultaneously but one after the other. Not since the Flood did was there a calamity which engulfed the whole world all at one time. There were countries which were spared hostilities during the two world wars. And the religion of Fr. Barcelon   cannot be found in many parts of the world either. Even in this country alone, the population implosion Fr. Barcelon is talking about could be happening in the enclaves of the rich like Forbes Park and Dasmarinas but outside of those few places, this country is being overwhelmed by excess humans regardless of what these fools say.

            Population control advocates including Senator Panfilo Lacson and Congressman Edcel Lagman have an incontrovertible argument: Two families with the same income one with two children and the other with four children live different lives. I never heard those on the other side of the fence answer that but I imagine that if you press them to do so, they would try to wriggle out of it  by saying it all depends on the sort of parents involved which of course is not the real issue. I gather that misleading reasoning is common among these people and that includes the lawyers among them. 

            Yes, just like I showed in the first part of what now looks is going to be a series  several weeks ago, the enemies of population control would do anything except admit that the galloping population growth in this country is  like a heavy millstone around its neck. One of their favorite arguments which they say is backed up by studies of economists is that the poverty of this country is not really caused by the excess mouths to  feed but by the bungling of the government.

            This is a flawed argument. First, population control advocates never said that overpopulation is the only cause of the poverty in this country. Second, the government cannot make people who are determined to be poor, rich. I do not think any government in the world could provide a situation where people wracked with vices and saddled with laziness and scatterbrains would better their lives. That’s the very reason that even in the so-called first world countries there are also hobos. Governments could only do so much for people. Third, the government does not prevent people who are determined to be rich and have the wherewithal to become rich from becoming rich. My proof of that are the Chinese in our midst. I never heard of anyone complain that the government had a special bias for these non-native Filipinos but they practically own this country and they have only been here for several generations, while we were here since time immemorial. It’s just that for one, the Chinese, unlike majority of Filipinos, have enough sense to sire only children they could provide for.

            Granting that  the reason why the Chinese ride in airconditioned cars while we all ride in jeeps and breathe the air polluted by their airconditioned cars is that the Chinese make as many children as Filipinos do, but work harder than Filipinos, that only shows that the government is not solely to blame for the poverty of Filipinos.

            I know why the enemies of population  control insists that overpopulation is not a problem. Once they admit it, they will be forced to face what is unthinkable to them – artificial family control methods. That’s because even they know that there is no other means of controlling the legendary Filipino ability to procreate except by artificial means. Imagine being the 12^th most populated country in the world despite its puny size. If that’s not runaway libido, I do not know what is.

            Granting that education could control the population of this country, the question is how soon can we do it? Based on the experience of priests who stay in seminaries for a decade to learn to keep off women and yet some of whom still get accused of sexual harassment and actually sire children, that will take a long time indeed especially when you consider that to begin with, candidates for priesthood are already not the common run of males in this country. It is my fear that if the government will continue to toe the line of the Roman Catholic priests that education can rein in the population of this country, by the time we have started the process, we would be giving up simply from the realization of the sheer number of the people to educate.  And by the realization of the impossibility of drilling into their heads the desire to control their sexual urges.

            And it would be good if the advocates of this lunatic solution have already begun   the task. I still have to hear of priests and church workers going to the child factories of my town bearing the news of the small family. As in many of the causes they preach and rant about ad nauseum, they are deplorably lacking in action. 

            Just like Fr. Emeterio Barcelon who I mentioned in the first  installment of  this piece, these people even go as far as say that the Philippines is not really overpopulated. These people refuse to accept realities. They put down the monstrous traffic jams to the rich buying too many vehicles, the poor street people in Manila to government neglect. They do not even see that more people now stand outside the church doors during masses. They still think that the command of God to go and multiply is as valid now as when the world began. What priests and their fellow population explosion advocates  do not realize or simply refuse to see is that God gave the command when there was still a world to subdue unlike now when all natural resources are already in advanced degradation and at the verge of extinction.

            Listening to this people defend the untenable, I could hear again echoing through the ages the desperate attempts of the clergy and their minions to discredit the discovery  of Galileo that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way round. I could hear them tell their congregations that Galileo is a fool because he cannot see that the sun travels through the sky while the earth is inert.

            My conclusion is that these people be they priests or lay are more concerned with the perpetuation of a church dogma than with reality  and with it, the real interest and welfare of this country.  It took them centuries to accept that they erred in condemning  Galileo for his iconoclastic discovery and if it takes that long before they would accept that indeed the condom solution is the only salvation of this country from perdition due to overpopulation, then may God help us. That’s because they can browbeat the government into toeing their line which is the subject of yet another column.

By Estanislao C. Albano, Jr.

            (NOTE: This piece was written some years back but it is still as relevant as when it is written because Fr. Robert Reyes and thousands of other clergymen in this country still think and act as though their mission is outside, not inside their churches.)

I read with bated breath that story in the last issue of this paper about Fr. Robert Reyes, the Running Priest, taking his cause for simple living and environmental consciousness to the Cordillera  last week of this month.  The reason was that I wanted to find out if his itinerary includes Kalinga so that I will have a chance to confront one of the most visible symbols of what the clergy in this country has degenerated into in recent years.   But alas, Tabuk will not be so honored by the soles of  his running shoes.

            Given the chance to face this personality whose appearance on television prompts  me to switch channels, I would ask him pointblank what he thinks is the real mission of men of the cloth and if he is accomplishing this by spending his time running on the streets and roads advocating secular causes. Prior to his Cordillera marathon, he was seen on the streets of Cebu City calling for the review of a celebrated rape case there if I am not mistaken.  Relative to this, I would also ask him about the current spiritual health of the people in the parish he is assigned to. My personal opinion is that a priest has no business outside of his fold if there are spiritually sick or lost members in his flock. What I mean is that priests just like other people should first do their assignments before trying to take on other tasks. If simple living is his concern,  Fr. Reyes should ensure that all people in his parish live simple lives before coming to the Cordillera or going elsewhere to spread that particular gospel.

            I would also ask him if what he is doing has precedents in Christian history.  Of course the New Testament did not record all the activities of the Apostles and other Christian preachers in the early days but by any stretch of the imagination, I could not see St. Paul or St. Peter taking up advocacies other than the spiritual salvation of men. And in that they were correct because people who are spiritually sound are free from the attitudes, vices and way of life which Fr. Reyes and his ilk are fighting against in their  own strength. For one, I do not think a real Christian would be so greedy and irresponsible to decimate the trees in the forest knowing that such will endanger the community and deprive future generations of their resource.  The Apostles believed in the power of the gospel in bringing about fundamental changes in the way men lived. For one, St. Paul declared in II Corinthians 5:17  “Therefore, if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have  passed away; behold, all things have become new.” When he said that, St. Paul was not making a wish. He was stating the truth because how else would the enemies of the Gospel say of him and Silas: “Those who have turned the world upside down have come here too.” (Acts 17:6)?

            Which brings as to the point which I raised sometime back that every time Roman Catholic priests in  this country rail publicly against jueteng, corruption, etc., and in the case of Fr. Reyes run against this or that, they are just proclaiming to the world their inutility as preachers of the Christian religion. As could be seen from the Biblical record, Christianity is not helpless against evil. History also tells us that during the spiritual upheavals in Europe brought about by the powerful preaching of  people who deserve to be called men of God, there was evident change for the better in the morality of the people. The mere fact that Fr. Reyes and his fellows in the Catholic Church still use venues other than their churches  to denounce this or that is enough proof that the transforming power of the Christian religion still has to be felt in this country. I will ask Fr. Reyes who he thinks are to own most of the blame for that given the fact that this country is 85 percent Roman Catholic.

            What the Running Priest is doing has similarity with what the tribes of Israel did against the city of  Jericho in that in both cases, the feet have been used for a purpose other than that of getting people someplace. They marched around the city for  seven days.  The similarity ends there, however.  I will point to Fr. Reyes that there are stark differences. First, the tribes accomplished the objective because in the seventh day, Jericho fell into their hands. By contrast, I do not think all that mileage of the shoes of Fr. Reyes has brought this country any  concrete good and even if he keeps running until his retirement, I do not think it will make this country any better. Second and more importantly, the tribes got their instructions to march around Jericho from God. I will ask Fr. Reyes where he got his orders to run for PAYAK and the convicted rapists in Cebu City because I do not believe God would want priests to dissipate their strength and dilute the Gospel.

            Now, if after these questions, Fr. Reyes would still listen to me, I would suggest that if he wants to inject something from the Christian religion into his PAYAK demonstration and thereby achieve results from his exertions for a change, he should borrow  what Christ told the scribes and Pharisees who wanted the adulteress stoned. Instead of inviting all comers to run with him, he should limit it to only the people who are already practicing the ways of the PAYAK.  

            The news item gave me an idea. Why should not I, ala Fr. Reyes, buy a running shoes and start running for a cause, too?  That is for priests and pastors stop running away from but instead go back to their original and real  calling – looking after the spiritual well-being of their flocks – and leaving the secular concerns to secular authorities and other sectors. Not that I have hopes that the subjects would take heed because usually, fools do not change their minds. It is just to make the public take a critical look at the clergy running away from their mission and possibly, build up pressure on them to remain in their parishes and do their real homework because in the first place, if they are ineffective in their churches, what gives them the idea that they could be effective elsewhere?

By Estanislao C. Albano Jr.

Shortly after I came home for good in 1985 ending an 11-year stay outside the province, several of my college friends came to visit Tabuk. One of the things I proudly pointed out to them about my hometown was that it does not have paupers on the streets in stark contrast with other urban centers in the country which abound with beggars.

Twenty-four years later, I could still tell outsiders that Tabuk is one place where families take care of their own so that no member has to go out on the street with a pan in his hand just to keep body and soul together. Except for two mentally ill persons who you could see walking or sitting in public places in the city, the streets are clear of vagrants. And these two vagrants do not stretch their hands to people either. I guess they have places to go home for food when they are hungry and also to rest when they are weary because you do not find them on the streets after nightfall.    

While it is true that we still do not see beggars on the streets of Tabuk these days, I  now hesitate to claim to visitors that the city is beggar-free in a sense. That’s because some years after I came home, I have found out to my dismay that a culture of mendicancy has crept into the place and taken deep roots while I was away. I say that because during my childhood, the shameless practice was not yet in evidence. I have discovered that the culture of depending on others for ones needs has become hopelessly ingrained among a sizable portion of the population of Tabuk.  

A  local politician I have had the chance to discuss the matter with lamented that there is no way the attitude of mendicancy in Tabuk can be cured.  From his own experience, the politician said that Tabuk is one place where people would cadge cigarettes and then later ask for fare home and not just to an address in the city but to a place like Tinglayan which is more than P50.00 away.  He also related that during the last barangay election, someone who claimed to be his political supporter went to his house and asked for P10,000.00 so that he could run for kagawad.

“There are people here who have the nerve to go solicit money to pay for the multa or penalty of someone who has killed or harmed someone. A recent case was when a member of one tribe got drunk and mauled someone. After the amicable settlement, the tribe went around soliciting for the multa. There was also one time when a group of people came to me to solicit for barbed wire to fence a land which they grabbed. In fairness to the people in the center of the city, it’s those in the outskirts who take the act of asking others for one’s needs to a weird level,” the politician said.

The politician said that the mendicant culture of Tabuk comes into full bloom before and during elections when individuals and groups troop to the houses of the candidates to ask for things like vats, kitchen utensils and even spray cans.  “This is what induces politicians to commit corruption because people expect them to have much money when their paychecks are just good enough for their family.  On the other hand, many politicians feed the mendicant mentality of the people by offering them money and goods in exchange for votes. That’s the reason why elections in the city are expensive. It’s a vicious cycle. The people think politicians are providers and the politicians think the people could be bought. So one of the effects of the culture is that good leaders with no money cannot be elected,” the politician said. Speaking from his own experience, the politician added that there are even people in the city who have the nerve to go solicit from winning candidates they did not support.

According to the politician, at the bottom of the reprehensible practice of many Tabukenos are as follows: the natural desire of people to get something for nothing;

disinclination to exercise one’s creativity and industry to obtain something; and the attitude of wanting to get something from politicians before the elections on the belief that once elected, the politicians will be beyond reach. 

The politician said that Tabuk is also one place where people plan celebrations and then go around soliciting the wherewithal for such occasions. Guilty of this are  barangay officials who go panhandling before their fiestas some of whom admit to people they ask assistance from “Awan ngamin ti ipakanmi kadakayo.” (We have no food to serve you.) Why plan an activity you yourself cannot fund, the politician asks. Why indeed.  Personally, until people fund their own celebrations, the same will  be hollow and meaningless. Where is the old Kalinga practice of hospitality when it’s the guests who will produce the food and drinks for the hosts?

The politician clarifies that there are good and worthy causes to solicit for such as the sportsfests of  Kalinga youth organizations outside the province. According to him, the occasions afford students a chance to ease their yearning for home and at the same time enjoy the benefits of sports. “The important thing is they should have a counterpart which could come in their seeing to it that the event is successful,”  he said.

That reminds me that during his two terms as presiding officer of the Sangguniang Bayan, ex-vice mayor Marquez Sal-ao has initiated the policy that the body will only respond to solicitations for assistance to the sick and victims of disasters. When I brought this up to the politician, he pointed out said that most of the begging taking place in the city are for the immediate gratification of those soliciting and not really meant to answer a worthy need they themselves could not provide for.

The politician said that even teachers are infected with this mendicant mentality when they solicit for medals for practically the whole class. Personally, not only does that negate the role of teachers as good examples for the public but also cheapens rewards for school children at the end of the school year as almost all members of the class gets a medal. But that’s another topic.  

Six recent pieces on the population issue are contained in this blog. If you missed my initial volley on the subject, just go farther down the blog.  

By Estanislao C. Albano, Jr.

I am going to Manila this 22^nd for a reunion of former staffers of  The Quezonian, the student paper of the Manuel L. Quezon University (MLQU) which  I guess has already been closed by the administration several years back. Along with The Dawn of the University of the East and The Collegian of the University of the Philippines-Dilliman, The Quezonian was among  the first student organs  revived some six years after the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law and padlocked the press including campus papers. These student organs were the initial concrete results of the first stirrings of student activitism during Martial Law.  

Then a journalism student of the MLQU, I was a member of the second batch of staffers of the resurrected paper. We had a two-year term which begun in  the first semester of 1979. It was in the campus paper where I first dealt with the population subject. I remember raging against the irresponsible people who bring children into the world without thought of their future in my column and also lamenting the fate of these children in a poem. Back in those days I had this mistaken notion that I could write poems. I will try to go to the library of the university during my coming trip to xerox those pieces for purposes of sharing with you just in case the amateur outputs do not make me blush.

Before going to Manila to pursue my college education in 1976, I was already deeply troubled by the problem of what I now call future-less children. I trace back my awakening to the problem to one night in early 1976. As part of our training in the Mountain Bible College in Sinipsip, Buguias, Benguet where I was in my second year, we have to go around soliciting subscribers to our church’s magazine and the  practice was that wherever darkness finds us, we would look for an allied church to spend the night in. That particular night, I found myself in the town of Sayangan, Benguet and went to the Baptist Church there. The pastor and his family were on a trip and it was the woman caretaker who took me in.

The caretaker and her family were occupying a tiny house beside the parsonage and it was there where she invited me to lodge. When I entered the shack, I saw these seven children sitting before the stove to keep themselves warm. Just like the caretaker, they were all thin and obviously malnourished. I estimated the eldest to be around 10 years old and the youngest a toddler. The woman who must have been in her early 30s but looked much older said they were all her children. From our conversation as she boiled rice, I found that the congregation had decided to make her  caretaker so that she could get some support for her children plus a roof over their heads. Previously, the family only depended on the daily wages of her husband who worked as a laborer in a vegetable garden.  The sight of those children eating rice with just salt disturbed me for a long time.

But they were not what I wrote about in my column in the Quezonian. It was that cadaverous women who was a fixture in the eastern end of the Quiapo underpass back then. At first, she had one emaciated baby with her and then later, a newer baby. There were times the two babies were with her with one in her arms and the other lying on a sheet on the floor.  Why a woman who begged for a living would bring another living being into the world and not content with that, still another was beyond me. Everytime I passed the woman, my indignation that there are Filipinos like her and that woman in Sayangan welled within me. If I remember right, I recommended in my column that child-bearing should be conditional and not an indiscriminate right, that before having a baby, couples should first show proof to authorities they have the economic wherewithal to properly provide for the child otherwise they would be disallowed from doing so.

I  also did the pictures of  the  paper then and used to tote the camera wherever I went but it never occurred to me to take a photo of the woman in the underpass and her babies I do not know why. Had I done so, the photo could now be used to counter  the slide of the poor children shown by Congressman Roilo Golez during his debate with Congressman Edcel Lagman on the RH Bill. The caption would be as follows: “1980. Where are these children now?”  

Regardless of the allegations of  Golez that many poor children become successful in life, I am dead certain that the children of that woman, if they survived their infancy, have inherited the economic status of their irresponsible parents.  I could bet my bottom peso that they never became assets to the country. Just like thousands of  similarly placed Filipino children  all over the country then and now, they did not and do not stand a chance. 

Another encounter I had while in the MLQU but which I have never gotten around to  write about then was with the clan of shoe-shine boys plying their trade near the school. I got acquainted with one of the members after having patronized his shoe-shine services several times. If I happen to pass by during their drinking sessions in some nook of the block, he would invite me to take a shot then he would ask for some amount for purposes of buying the next bottle. At one time, he proudly declared to me that all the ambulatory shoe-shining outfits in the area belonged to their family and that it was their father who laid claim to the turf when he was still young. He also said that their children would inherit the territory.  He did not talk about it but I assumed that they lived in some slum somewhere in the city.

What I could not understand then and until now is how come a shoe shine-boy who lives from hand to mouth sires many children. While it is true that procreation is a God-given right, men are equipped with brains so they could figure out when to and when not to exercise the right. This  brings as to one other reason I could never agree with anti-RH Bill exponents when they say that children are assets and not liabilities. It all depends on a lot of factors foremost of which is what kind of parents they have.  When the parents do not even have the intelligence to appreciate what a grave responsibility bringing a child into the world entails and to know that with their squalor, they are hardly in the position to  bring the responsibility upon themselves, just what kind of children will they beget? This is not prejudging children from big and poor families but then we could not do away with the obvious that there is a correlation between intelligence and success  and intelligence basically comes through the genes.  But I am not ready to get deeper into that topic now.

Meantime, suffice it to say that  my first encounters with this country’s future-less children convinced me of the need for population control on the ground that it is the height of irresponsibility and senselessness to bring into the world children who may, due to their miserable conditions, regret the day they were conceived. Meaning, as far as I was and I am concerned, that woman in Sayangan and the one in the Quiapo underpass and their respective husbands should have put off  having babies until they found a decent source of income to ensure that the child  is  properly taken care of. Also,  the father of my shoe-shine boy friend in Quaipo should have dreamt of his children improving on his status and one key decision towards the fulfillment of that aspiration would have been to limit the number of his children.