The Phone is Mightier Than the Sword

I didn’t realize how dependent I had become with my cellular phone. I haven’t been able to contact anybody because all the numbers I need are stored in the phone that is sitting in my clinic in Oklahoma. I also wonder how many people have unsuccessfully tried to reach me. Until my friend brings the phone back to me on the 20th, I will remain scarce. What can I do?

There was a survey that came out today detailing how Filipinos perceived GMA as the most corrupt president ever. She even came out ahead of Marcos. Obviously, many of the respondents (ages 18 and over) had not been around when Marcos was in power. Or a substantial population that had been thoroughly disillusioned during that period were now unavailable to be surveyed, having migrated to other countries. Or simply how easy people forget.

We tend to take for granted our relatively untrammeled freedom to express ourselves. All these blogs and speeches and published opinions would never have existed when Marcos was King. Everybody was afraid then.

Travel was restricted, the educational curriculum was tightly controlled and the Military was feared. For all her phone calls to election officials, her husband’s unsavory meddling, an assortment of corrupt cronies, the Marcos dictatorship was the absolute pits. Corruption was ruthlessly centralized. Many “opposition” personalities who are very vocal today in condemning GMA were either active collaborators to the dictatorship or are the progeny, direct beneficiaries of that cursed era.

There’s just too much politics in our country. We should be talking about the deteriorating dollar, the sky-high prices of oil, worsening infant and maternal mortality rates, widespread malnutrition … Instead, many pundits are spending too much time fantasizing about various presidential permutations for an election that is still 2 ½ years away.

We desperately need to conserve energy, and develop indigenous sources of fuel including but not limited to ethanol, solar and wind. We should rationally re-examine reviving the mothballed nuclear plant. We must make the strengthened peso work to our nation’s advantage (paying off some of our debts to save on interest expense, investing in technology to achieve greater productivity) . We must continue to increase our trade with China and become self-sufficient in rice production. We should consider taking over some of the security responsibilities of the US in Iraq (and avail for ourselves a portion of the billions of dollars being poured in that region weekly).

We need to be doing things other than engage in the same old politics which will get us nowhere. These musings are the effect of cell phone deprivation. The phone is mightier than the sword.