Perpetual wars and R and R’s - Chasing the Wind by Felipe B. Miranda

Contrary to popular belief, Filipinos could well be a warlike people. Everywhere one turns, there is a war going on and everyone appears to be a combatant of sorts. By this time, nearly everyone has promoted himself/herself from buck private and corporal to general and field marshal. Everyone is a battle-scarred strategist and dispenses brilliant, detailed master plans for decisively winning each and every one of the ten thousand wars simultaneously raging in this archipelago of seven thousand one hundred emerald (?) isles.

A war against poverty. Another war against inflation. Yet a third war against illegal drugs. A war against jueteng lords. A war against illegal recruiters. A war against smuggling. A war against graft and corruption. A war against price fixing. A war against cronyism. Still another war against pollution. A war to neutralize reckless drivers. Another war to fight incorrigible jaywalkers. And yet another war – the war of the sexes — dramatized by violent public encounters between crusading hyphenated females and stonewalling opinionated males.

In the 70’s and 80’s, the warlike military kept records of its protracted war against the CT’s and the ST’s, neither of which had to do with Soichiro Honda’s nor Manny Villar’s provocative ads. The "communist terrorists" and the "southern terrorists" kept the country and its military quite busy in the war against terrorism.

The DT’s or Diliman terrorists were a case of mistaken identity. Some overzealous military agents mistook many of UP’s "terror teachers" to be dangerous terrorists deserving of a status-building invitation to Crame or an extended R and R in Bicutan. Most DT’s are actually the meekest of souls once you get them out of their customary habitat, the classrooms. Of course within those four walls, with a door, some windows, a blackboard and about 35 students, many DT’s are transformed into formidable Hitlers for between one hour to one hour and a half. It must be prolonged AIDS — acute income deficiency syndrome — which does strange things to people who might have started their careers with a fairly unremarkable, possibly even normal personality.

The war zone is everywhere, with practically every one a gladiator in battle gear. You try to turn on your tap and the water, following the preferred paradigm of mainstream economists who picked up their graduate degrees in some First World university, trickles down, one precious lingering drop after another. Pick up the telephone to call the water company and neither the nationalistic nor global landline nor the smartest cellular company turns out to be your ally. Walk out of the house into morning traffic and the first bus driver to come along willfully tries to run you down. Only your quick reflexes and functional skills as a paranoid enable you to evade him, and you start thinking the way you did it just might earn you a job as a torero in some Madrid corrida.

You decide to forgo that short walk to the water company and get into your car. A gauntlet of 200 meters you think might be better handled encased in your automobile rather than your nature-given hide. Battling with tanods, MMDA traffic aides, PNP’s finest with their 34-inch middles and the water company’s own security guard, you finally made it to the water company’s parking lot a full 45 minutes after the company balked at letting you brush your teeth with enough water to go with the toothbrush and the toothpaste.

After another ten minutes in the building, asking for directions and being directed, you are face to face with somebody with a face. You tell him about your classified, top-secret mission to get water to flow a little bit more forcefully into your house mains and you are quickly assured that a quick response team would attend to your concern most quickly.

That was Monday, sometime in September, year 2000. This is October 7, same year 2000. You now brush your teeth in your office, two kilometers away from your house because, there, in your office, water somehow still flows when you turn on the tap.

In the midst of wars, one of course eventually realizes that the final solution is waging a war to end all wars. However, on a Sunday, in the midst of wars, can one be blamed for asking whether in this entire republic there might be at least one little place where one could go on furlough and, if only for 24 hours, have a little R and R?