Can't entrust the Philippines to Gloria, so hand it over to George? Wait a minute.
With the imminent breakdown of the US financial system, following the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the teetering of such revered financial institutions as Merrill Lynch and AIG, I believe the heydey of US hegemony is over. It is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan--which is a culmination of a history of overarching geopolitical expansion and alliance-making that it can no longer sustain.
Granted, the Philippine government is corrupt and inept. But is a government that misallocates resources to finance foreign wars at the expense of its basic infrastructure (remember what they said about the Minneapolis Bridge collapse), or is so busy policing the Middle East that it is unable to cope with the surge in its own domestic crime and random violence, or is so preoccupied with pitching capitalism to Russia and China that it is caught off guard by the free-enterprise subprime debacle at home, really a better alternative? Come on.
Dong Lorenzo, I, too, mourn for the 10,000 children and adults dying from preventable diseases and hunger in the Philippines. To save these poor souls quickly, I think the Japanese government, with the highest life expectancy in the world and state-of-art medicine would do a much better job. After all, devoid of military power, it certainly seems more acceptable than the gung-ho US and geographically closer to home, to boot.
But I simply wonder how I could trust even the Japanese government to save 10,000 from poverty when it is so helpless in the face of a spiking suicide rate that exceeded 33,000 last year and is still rising...
Traveling more frequently now between here and Bohol, I simply can't help but be amazed that if I put a tag price to my joy and well-being, it costs infinitely more in yen than in peso.
Where I am, life is comfortable, too. But I never think of trading the freedom, sunshine and simple life back home with the pall of everyday life here where every yen of comfort is almost worth one's sanity.
This may not be the most rational argument for me to say "No, thanks" for making the Philippines an adjunct of some first-world country. But I can't quantify my joy when I hear Celine extol a whizz kid from the Philippines named Charice, or small-town Manny Pacquiao demolishing international boxing ring icons, or a Filipina CEO revitalizing Starbucks in Japan when the company is retreating everywhere else...
Leave the Philippines to the Filipinos, please. (Yeah, Belle, as if the US is willing to take us, anyway.) Cheers!
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