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IT is a moving story and it tugs at every heart that wants to leave
the rat race but cannot take the plunge. This is the story of the
daughter of Sixto Roxas, who was once the equivalent of Obama’s
Larry Summers, who left the big city to spend her life in the
Palawan island of Boayan with her French husband to hear the daily
splashing of the waves against the unspoiled shores.
We can just imagine the great life she has been
living for the past 20 years. No politician bloviating on TV
screens. No shrill commentator spewing half-truths and hogwash. No
daily saturation of stories about corruption, unbridled ambition and
ruinous passion. No convoy of escorted VIP vehicles driving you off
the roads. No sight of urban blight and the equally dehumanizing
face of rural poverty.
No tabloids with end of the world headlines and
the goriest of crimes.
We just wish that her idyllic life would just go
on and on— unbothered by outside forces. She fully deserves to be
left in peace. She made her choice; the outside world should leave
her alone.
But the problem is real life is not like that.
Island refuges are never safe— especially when
accountants and finance people say they can raise a lot of money.
After it was deemed that Boayan will be profitable as a big-time
tourist destination, Ditchay Roxas should have seen what was coming:
big developers, bulldozers and construction workers intruding and
disrupting her idyllic life in the island.
As sure as the sun sets in the evening, Ditchay
Roxas will be forced to move out of Boayan on the day her lease on
the island expires. She will not be given the chance to appeal her
case. She will be bodily dragged away and shipped off via the first
available pump boat if she insists on staying put.
In our sad country, this daughter of an esteemed
economist would soon realize, the color of money trumps everything.
A few years back, this was found out by the
indigenous people in the upland reaches of Nueva Vizcaya. The
Casecnan Dam was built to generate irrigation water and power over
the protest of the tribal people there. The protests were unheeded
and those who pursued the rights of the indigenous people were
accused of fronting for communist organizations and hunted down.
Bulldozers came to clear cut the original timber
stand, hardwood that had been in existence for hundreds of years. An
invaluable slice of bio-diversity was wiped out by marauding
bulldozers. The indigenous people dislocated moved deeper into the
mountains. Some moved into the lowlands and lived by begging.
It would have been a consuelo de bobo if the
Casecnan Dam had functioned according to what was envisioned in the
original plan – a never-ending and reliable fount of irrigation
water and power. Today, the Casecnan is on the list of dams that
require urgent rehabilitation.
A few years back, a group of lumads, our version
of Stone Age people, came out from the remote jungles where they
have been staying for centuries to protest the expansion of a nickel
project in northern Palawan. They claimed that the nickel project
would spew toxic wastes into coral reefs, kill flora and fauna that
found to exist only in that area and cut swaths of destruction so
vast that would include rows upon rows of mangrove stands that no
man has touched for centuries.
You know what the decision was: full speed ahead
to the nickel expansion project and its toxic wastes.
Who cares about the environment, bio-diversity,
the loss of priceless species if ranged against additional figures
for the foreign direct investments (FDI) and additional revenues.
Deciding for the planet would have been a big no-brainer.
Decades earlier, the entire township of
Pantabangan was drowned by a giant multi-purpose dam. During summer,
the spire of the old town church emerges from the shallow waters, as
if to remind all and sundry of the folly of sinking an entire town
just to build a silt-prone dam.
Never, in our sad story as a people, has saving
life triumphed over the promise and color of money.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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