NO NEED is more naked or essential, arousing our animal instinct, than survival.
Creatures of comfort, we would even raise hell as long as it could spare us the purgatory of being left out in the cold.
Weather gone wild, some may say about the bizarre behavior of the temperature lately.
Sure, these are days that come dropping like a wrecking ball enough for even the irrepressible Miley Cyrus to feel inhibited, if not envious of women with menopausal spells of hot flashes.
See how it swoops down as good as a demolition job against the most vulnerable, not the least the beasts. As reported straight from the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, “even polar bears… were being kept indoors” while the United States and the rest of North America plunged into deep freeze.
Hardly breezy goes the rest of the animal kingdom elsewhere, as if no pastoral disposition worthy of a Disney endures out of our idyllic imagination under a temperate or tropical sun.
Here in Cebu, the weather station has waxed ominous about the “amihan,” the northwest monsoon wind stirring up cold so extreme it left some mountain barangays with intimations of doom. Residents in six mountain barangays in Balamban, for instance, have blamed the blast of chill for the “deaths of some livestock and damage to crops” worth at least P2.4 million in damages.
Suffering, perennial as the rain and its arid interlude, has been worn like second skin by a nation almost numbed with its tidal recurrence of misfortune. Indeed, the sluggishness or state of drift, steeped in the drudgery of disasters man-made and natural, seems to have rendered permanent the weather of discontent.
Where the inner reserves of resilience and humor barely dilute the undertow of existentialist angst and its restless questions, answers scarcely bubble up from the crosscurrents of messy politics and murky public policy.
Method in madness—the ways and means of a wish meant well enough to move mountains.
That’s what we hope to see, clear as summer sky, beyond the doubt that shadows and lingers through the glimmer of sense that we can glean from the sunlit rhetoric about disaster preparedness and assurances for availability of calamity funds.
Fine enough to put money where the mouth is, but nothing beats investment of initiatives—concrete and persistent—in larger issues that extend beyond the here and now. A harvest of answered prayers may yet be possible if our leaders can sow solidarity into and commitment from the grassroots for casting our lot and raising our own stakes in global concerns such as climate change.
Constant has been the cloud of unknowing about what we can collectively do. Unless we get unleashed from our uncertainties, chances are less favorable for steering ourselves forward—unlike tractable cows that simply wait— along with a heartwarming leadership we could not only lean on but also shepherd us into a leap of faith.
(geemyko@gmail.coms)