If a man writes a better book, if he can preach a better sermon, if he can make a better candlestick than anyone else, though he make his home in the woods, the world will beat a trodden path to his door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today, more and more are glued on their TV sets, trying to witness the action, the event touted by media hype as an event that could eclipse all known classic fights in the history of boxing. It was the most awaited match as being marketed by this phenomenal global internet and social media and exaggeratedly pronounced by many pundits as Fight of the Century.
As believers in Christ, I want you to know that we are all inevitably engage in an endless spiritual battle, unparalleled even by this much- publicized boxing match of two known pugilists’ champions. You have to understand that as true believer in Christ, you are perpetually engaged into unseen spiritual battle and this shall only end at the second coming of Christ.
If you cannot appreciate the significance of such future universal event, the second coming of Christ, then you will only see troubles and pains as if they are unnecessary realities of life. Failing to appreciate the present internal spiritual reality could be the reason many professing believers feel dejected, discouraged and always in a hurry to dwell on that utopian heaven. Believers are always into a kind of dilemma on how to live their earthly lives.
The second coming of Christ is a universal event that many believers have prayed for almost two millennia.
There are great clouds of witnesses cheering for us towards our ultimate salvation, our physical adoption which will be characterized by the compatibly of our internal spiritual perfection with the external decadent-free creation. Only those who acknowledge the supremacy of Christ over everything can have a taste of this.
On that day, all imperfections shall be gone. Including our impartial and erroneous knowledge about God, which has disturbingly induced men to hate each other, all for the sake of bigotry and intolerance of others’ belief; this too shall be removed altogether. This is the greatest event in the history of all creation. You do not want to miss this universal event in the future by trusting Christ today.
Finally I got a bus, bound for Tagum, after a daylong office-related chore in Davao City. I took an aircon bus bound for Butuan City. I took a seat next to a guy, probably 5 years younger than me. His name is Lito. He comes from Maitum, Sarangani. He is a professional driver and a licensed heavy equipment operator(HEO).
Our friendly conversation filled that hour and a half shuttling from Davao City towards Tagum. Although, my new friend will have five more hours to travel before reaching the town of Carrascal, Surigao del Sur, where he is driving a new Yutong Mining Dump Truck for a company that got a contract of transporting red soils from sites located in towns of Cantilan and Carrascal, both of Surigao del Sur. Lito disclosed that is being paid Four Hundred Pesos per loading towards awaiting barges, 22 kilometers away from the mining site. Lito was unreserved upon announcing that he overheard from his Filipino- Chinese employer that the red soils mined from the two Surigao del Sur towns were being exported to China and Greece.
Those bit of information I got from a bus seatmate prompted me to write this note. I remember those days when logging trucks regularly plying the Agusan-Davao national highway, hauling trees from forests sites of Melale and Agusan del Norte towards the wharf in Maco, Davao Province (now COMVAL). I was a kid back then. It was the later part of 70’s until the early 80s. Those logging companies are nowhere to be found now, sad to note, our natural resources were also gone, those century-old trees where being exported to Japan and other opulent nations back in Marcos days. What remained are these bald mountains that surrounded many settlements here in Mindanao.
Yesterday it was just our forests, today they mined our red soils too. Even though, I am 400 kilometers away from the towns of Cantilan and Carrascal of Caraga Region and I could be misconstrued as over reacting about an iron ore mining that are taking place hundreds of kilometers away from me. Why should I have to concern myself with this? If the folks in Surigao are all benefiting from the employments generated from this mining business, what is wrong about this economic activity in the secluded and mountainous areas of Northeastern Mindanao? Anyway, the local governments in those towns are generating extra ordinary revenues from royalties and concessions fees. Their lives would be dramatically changed because of the influx of business establishments in the area and the circulation of millions of pesos coming from wages of town residents employed in the mining company.
Soon the above named towns could be the next new emerging First Class municipalities in Caraga region, but, at what cost? What would be impending consequences that will affect not just the places where mining sites are located but the whole Island of Mindanao in general? Should we all wait for another Pablo or Yolanda to strike, in order for us to awaken from decades of stupor and indifference regarding our wanton abuse of nature? Many thought that nature is our bondslave and existed only to bring comfort to this arrogant dominant species of an aging planet. What if we are wrong and instead of treating nature as our bondslave, we are being asked by the Maker to treat nature, this earth as our equal partner and deserves respect and care from us humans. What if all anthropocentric doctrines that reinforced human species' supremacy over other life forms in this planet is a lie and needs reformulation? What happens, if the red soils in Cantilan and Carrascal were all depleted? What's next to this desecration of nature in Caraga? Will our national government just keep mum about this travesty of our natural resources in Caraga?
The bygone era of logging magnates have bequeathed to us a ravaged forests and disrobed mountains. What will I give as a gift to the next generation of Filipinos, if, what remaining natural resources that I have today are completely sold out and gone in the next 10 years?
What was Tagum then? The place was once a marsh lowland, and was only good for growing rice and fluvial vines like kangkong (Ipomoea aquatica) and water lilies abundantly grew here. My grandfather had once quipped about his observation when he visited Magugpo (old name of Tagum) in 1940, before World War II broke out, he observed the abundant growth of mangrove trees and fluvial species, and he laugh about his fond memory of those blood-sucking leeches (alimatok) that gets thicker as it insatiably suck out blood from them who wandered and wallowed on those knee-deep muds of Magugpo and they were searching for dry grounds to set foot.
During the early 70’s, Tagum was known for its moviehouses, located at those dark and dingy places were workmen from logging companies and their families had thronged during payday, temporarily leaving behind their impoverished unlit bunkhouses constructed in the middle of forests sites. Tagum was considered then as their get-away from their daily monotony of cutting trees, scaling logs and driving those noisy hauling trucks. Going downtown was perhaps considered then by innocent young men as their way of getting connected with the cosmopolitan, or perhaps their sort of escapade from their boring bunkhouses in the highland. There were handful logging companies that were lavishly favored by the authoritarian regime of Marcos then, and were given permit to trample and raze down the last remaining frontier of Southern Mindanao in the 60s up to the 70s. Those pioneers in logging business, such as the Sarmientos, the Alcantaras, the Dalisays and the Aguinaldos, they had made lucrative gains from that logging concessions, through their coveted quid pro quo arrangement with the late Strongman Marcos.
However, during the early 80’s, the gold rush suddenly put Tagum in the maps of big mining companies throughout the country, the golden days had arrived. Overnight, the place became a boom town, as seen by this manqué eyes, the influx of gold diggers were visibly remembered. Those highgraders, as the moniker they earned, were like ragtag soldiers, wearing their pair of muddied Hush Puppies sneakers and Levis jeans and were unmindful of the fresh clays and mud that clung on their shirts and jackets, it was a signature appearance that only few had understood then and deciphered those strange dress code. Only the smart few had decoded those shabby appearances, and only the brilliant hookers had debunked the highgraders game plans. Those highgraders have wandered in groups, from one pub to another, pursuing unstoppable debauchery. They had pocketful of money to waste and were hopeful that their nine lives were still intact, for them to go back onto their unwanted graveyards, their underground abysses where elusive black gold dust were collected and their unusual hedonism was supported by it. Their extravagant lifestyles could be a curse they got from those unabated desecration of the natural mountains of Boringot, Diwalwal and Valma where prized dusts were incessantly mined and processed and sold to Tagum.
Today, after that economic uproar of the 80’s had settled down, Tagum is now the home to some 242,801 residents as of 2012 Population Commission count and is growing by 2.93% annually as projected by the government’s think tank, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, and if such growth rate remains unchanged, by the year 2020, Tagum’s population will reach within the range of 300,000 to 350,000.
I never claim to be an urban analyst or an expert one, but all this tangible physical development of Tagum must be match by a comprehensive institutional policy of the local government in order to ensure that any future complications brought by this unprecedented urbanization will be addressed and any emergence of negative impact brought inevitably by the forthcoming development will be handled appropriately by the local government. Now there are new challenges confronting our inexperienced city. The seemingly unregulated construction of malls, the rising cost of living, the poor quality of air brought by the increase number of motor vehicles plying within the city proper, the increasing crime rates, the marginalization of urban poor, and also the annoying heavy traffic congestions during peak hours, these are the things that plagued many urban centers throughout the country and our emerging metropolis is not exempted from all these negative impacts.
Tagum should become a model kind of city, where urbanization with a human face must be the utmost goal of our local executives. This is not an antidevelopment essay. Because as the world is becoming smaller as each hour passes, and as new technologies are invented and massively produced and marketed, there are heavy price of development that will soon emerge. If such future development shall become a misanthrope that would gradually annihilate the human race, then such kind of advancement must be carefully studied and assessed by both technocrats and bureaucrats. The major stakeholders, the electorates of Tagum should also think deeper on this subject of urbanization. If we only foresee a city where high rise buildings dominate but at the same place surrounded by shanties and poor settlers, what kind of development would that be? If more and more city dwellers will become victims of petty crimes every day, what kind of urban development could we boast about? We have to brace ourselves against an onslaught of social transformation as Tagum’s urbanization comes into full blast. Our local policy makers can do their share as they study urbanization and collaborate with other advance metropolis of the country in order to learn from the latters’ rich experiences.
Music rhymes and lyrics have brought me to nostalgic past. Songs like Always Somewhere by Scorpions and El DeBarge’s Starlight Express were my old-time favorites. I was in grade school when these songs hit the airwaves. We goofed around a One- Speaker Sony Cassette Player owned by a hippie neighbor. Then and there, we endlessly listened to recordings from vinyl cassette tapes, played from Side A to Side B.
Anybody who owns a portable cassette player with AM/FM Radio during those days was considered "in". Those hit songs like Hotel California of Eagles, and House of the Rising Sun by Animals, all these had dominated the airwaves played from few FM stations during those times.
The only drawback those songs were permanently identified was its non- conformity to the standard of the music industry’s avant-garde then. The negative image constantly attached to those hyper-active punk rock artists. And those metallic songs were brazenly unacceptable to many of our conservative adults. Because our guardians have loved their Beatles, their Abba and their Bee Gees, our particular choice of music then was a perpetual suspect to them as the bad influence towards us young people then.
Our parents were reluctant to give us their approval of the music we had chosen. They were contemptuous to our seemingly irrational patronage of weird music artists like Duran Duran, Pink Floyd and Spandau Ballet. Adults had criticized us over our blind loyalty to our chosen music icons, we even copied those weird hairstyles of Spandau Ballet and we had defended our icons from conservative critics’ tireless name calling.
Today, we are now becoming parents to growing kids. Our choice of music is no longer appealing to our millennial kids. We need to co-exist with them and show some level of tolerance to the kind of music they love to play. Defining their own arts and music could be more important than making them dumb robots.