[Oe List ...] Jaime for Sept 12, Friday

[via OE]

The Earth's Dream


 
The vision was not a wish dream.  It was stark reality staring me in the face.  The 1968 image of the blue orb in space didnot have boundary lines conveniently delineated to keep people and nations apartfrom each other.
 
Language teachers at US Peace Corps in Muslim Mindanao inthe early 80s claimed that families used to visit cousins in Tawi-tawi andSandakan, Balabac and Kota Kinabalu, Sarangani and Sangi, gatherings that recalledoutrigger travels before Sulu's Sabah was a glitter in London's eyes, curtailedafter WWII when the edges of the nation-states of Malaysia, the Philippines andIndonesia were defined by the exiting colonial masters.
 
The West's decolonizing held to the boundaries of formercolonies, in our case, that of the British, the Spanish and the Dutch, keepingthem intact since economic neo-colonialism simply meant a change of personnel tokeep the business in place.  Basic goods werestill produced cheaply for export, and financing came from similar sources savethe new signatories had darker skins.
 
Ateneo U in the 70s identified 600 families that owned amajority of the Philippine's assets favored by Vatican's disposed lands.  The same was true of Indon datus and Malay sultans to their own hoipolloi in keeping the land  and of thesame ratio of the mestizos againstthe masa in the Philippines.  Even today when the Philippines is no longerthe sick man in Asia, and is the second best performing economy next to Chinain the books, it maintains the old case of poverty at the same dastardly place,and equity parity betwixt the mestizos andthe masa remains criminally disparate.
 
In my lifetime, I was exposed to three civilizationaldreams.  The first was that of my childhood,if only because I quickly discarded it. This was the European Dream of the Holy Roman Empire that saw Pope AlexanderVI in his Inter Cetera declare thatPortugal can go east while Spain can go west the year after Columbus completedhis first sail to the New world.  TheBritish embodied this in the arrogance of "the sun never sets on theBritish Empire".  Aryan superiority wasalready in place before the German Nazi's holocaust.
 
My second, the American Dream began with Thomas Jefferson's crafteddeclaration of independence (We holdthese truths to be self-evident, that all men (sic) are created equal, thatthey are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Right, that amongthese are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness) that led to its rule ofthe world from the benevolence of "the light on the hill" exceptionalismand manifest destiny, kept the global financial system tied to Wall Street, andthe oil spigots maintained from fields dominated by US-led military,technology, and personnel.  
 
America was the Protestants' Promise land, and it enslaved WestAfricans, distrusted Catholics (from Ireland to Italy), codified immigrationagainst Orientals of which the Chinese Exclusion Act and the pictures inNYTimes of brown little brothers newly evolved from the evolutionary tree, wereexamples.  JFK broke the back of theCatholic stigma with his election (as Obama did for "people of color")and jarred wide-open the human side of the slit-eye enigma when he opened thefloodgates of immigration.  Alas, he wassummarily assassinated.
 
Today, the American Dream emanates from Obama's counterfeit progressiveness(says Afro-Am Cornell West of Union Seminary, NYC) in his checkered presidency trailedby Hillary's hope for hers, while the boys of Jihad slit the throats ofwide-eyed journalists and captives they corral into their mountain lairs.
 
In the 80s, Deng Xiaoping revived the China Dream, a thirdon my list.  In its current incarnationtalked about rather than written in text, Xi Jinping proposes three items:  1) 1.4 billion people involved, beyond 80million members of the CCP; 2) playing field leveled at the urban-rural divide(making houkou registration reform anurgent task) so it does not determine status; and 3) a win-win perspective inglobal trade that goes beyond short-term gains to long-term benefits for allconcerned.
 
Reality stares us in the face.  Why maintain sovereignty lines that areleftovers from another era?  The Kurds,Shiites, and Sunnis are three political entities that could very well administertheir own affairs so why should we insist on boundaries that the Germans,Brits, French, and Dutch, delineated, which even strongman Saddam Hussein couldnot keep intact?  Ah, the oil. 
 
Oh, well, my own Earth Dream proceeds from and broadens China's.  My earthrise citizenship involves 7-billion peopleon behalf of 8.7 million earth species, and counting.  It removes the artificial classes of eco-politicalgroups that determines membership to the first, second, third, and otherworlds.  My value scale is leveled on creatures,not nations.  Finally, it requires awin-win situation rather than the lose-lose competition on economic growth.  The earth, dude, and the health of everycreature in it: my glocal mission.






j'aime la vie
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!



-----Original Message-----
From: Jayvee Vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>
To: Jaime R Vergara <pinoypanda2031 at aol.com>
Sent: Wed, Sep 10, 2014 12:33 pm
Subject: Re: Jaime for Sept 11, Thursday






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