<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;">Bao Bao and Obama's Free
Rider</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><i>Bao Bao </i>(literally,
baby) panda at the National Zoo gets attention as the native to forests of western
China entertain the crowds. I saw the
native environment of the bearcat on a trek to the Garze Autonomous Region of
Sichuan a year ago. I aborted when the
rains poured on mountain roads hand chiseled on ravined mountain cliffs from
raging waters eons before, making travel around more than what I bargained for. After seeing the mammals in a Chengdu
research station, I took the sweltering heat of the Sichuan plains in Chongqing,
upstream from the three-gorges dam.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">The panda is an endangered specie, cuddly in its behavior
before crowds but having encountered the creature at very close quarters, I am
not sure I want to be in the same pen with it in spite of its reputed disarming
demeanor even if I do not exactly taste like bamboo! (A <i>non-sequitur
</i>aside: a Shanghai nurse called me<i> bao
bao </i>once!)</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">For its appealing behavior, the panda, like other endangered
species in Mother Nature's kingdom, rides freely on the beneficence of parks
and recreation budgets, and allocations from international preserves and research
stations. Undisturbed and left to its
own devices, the Panda will survive.
Unhappily, there is no such secluded place in the planet anymore.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">It is in that context that I received Obama's joking
reference to China as a free rider when interviewed by NYTimes' Paul
Klugman. Though Obama's joke, explained
lightly as occasioned by a glance to his office in-tray piling up crisis after
another, asking, "Why can't China handle some of these things?" his
use of the free rider image might be a little overextended metaphor.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">A historical sweep of geocentric proclivities: the Ptolemaic
cosmology had the earth at the center of the universe before Copernicus suggested
otherwise. All roads led to Rome for the
Caesars until Constantine moved the Imperium to Byzantium. The Prophet's followers occupied Mecca before
the Ottoman's revived Constantine's hangout and called it Istanbul turning
cathedrals into mosques. Pope Alexander
VI kept the Roman Church in the game granting Portugal permission to own the
East, and Spain, the west.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">In the East, the eunuch Zhongguo navigator Zhanghe launched
an armada that dwarfed anything Columbus and Magellan later knew, but the Ming
dynasty turned inward and rubbed out the Admiral's gains out of official record
(they were burned), strengthened the social glue in the lands between the two
rivers (the Huanghe and the Yangtze), and connected the walls in its northern
borders so the barbarians would be kept at bay.
It did not but that didn't stop the rule of the Middle Kingdom. It acted as the center of civilization under
the mandate of heaven expecting obeisance from the rest of the world, rudely
violated by the Europeans, the US' westward ho, and Japan's Meiji mid-1800s.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">The wisdom of Kung Fu Tzu held an informal hegemony among
the Hans, extended to <i>Rìbĕn</i> (Japan), <i>Goryo</i> (Korea), <i>Yuenan </i>(Vietnam) that went politically independent while the Southern
Han, Zang, Uyghur, Mongols and Manchus stayed within the Kingdom, the latter
two from north of the Great Wall getting assimilated rather than imposing "foreign"
ways.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">The British Empire discovered the power of the internal
combustion engine and the politics of oil was birthed, with the industrial Ruhr
and modernizing Riben/Nippon in Manchukuo competing for the privilege of imperial
prominence, resulting in two devastating World Wars with the Americans, their demonstrated
nuclear military might over Hiroshima/Nagasaki, eventually becoming the
guardians to the spigot. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">A new world beyond oil emerged out of the blue (the Russians
sent a sputnik and a dog beyond the biosphere) when JFK's determination to send
a man to the moon was accomplished within a decade. The new earth came dramatically to me in the
earthrise picture of 1968 when my sense of social fealty and personal integrity
was formed, and I choose to be on all counts earthbound, not beholden to a loyalty
to a single nation, race, or religion. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Weekend New Year 2014 I spent in Hong Kong where the Occupy
Central gathered to disrupt Victoria Island's center, not unlike their well-off
cousins in the land of Siam. HK's anti-Occupy
has since taken to the streets, and Thailand just started the command and
control of the Generals. Ferguson MO
erupted when a young black man was shot to death by a white cop, for disrespectfully
speaking out-of-bounds.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">The metaphor I grew up in was to be a "son of God"
on behalf of all in servanthood as shown by Jesus the Nazarene. US exceptionalism uses the simile in a
privileged position, "a light on a hill", to regulate and rule it
over others.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">There is no escape from the inevitability of life's
interrelatedness to life. Albert Einstein
noticed that the fall of a leaf reverberates across the universe. The <i>bao
bao </i>pandas are no free riders. They
entertain for their meals! </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">China, likewise, works hard for its fried noodles. <i>Gambei!</i></div>
<br>
<div style="clear:both"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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