Amidst the global financial meltdown

The persistent slide of local revenues headed deeper south amidst the global financial meltdown and H1N1 leaves our peaceful mind drained, battered and forced into a guarded sense of hope, upon which we cling, praying “Enough.”

Against the steady tsunami of devastation, I have heard the hopeless expressions and longing from among families and friends of the golden days gone into the ash heap of history. But I’ve encouraged them to stay optimistic in that this socio-economic scourge is biblical and shall also pass someday soon.

It’s hard clinging to optimism given bad tidings of home foreclosures, job losses for lone family income earners, inability to pay for health care, and businesses going belly-up in this archipelago. These phenomena are all part and whole of the global financial meltdown, not to mention the economic consequences of the H1N1 flu. It’s a tale from which recovery would eventually emerge but on a protracted basis.

This is the inescapable reality in paradise today that could also be found in every neighboring country in Asia. More bad tidings as millions of college students in China won’t be able to land their first jobs upon graduation this year or thousands in Europe who will face the same fate.

Here at home, hundreds upon hundreds of able workers have been displaced by the closure of the once $1.2 billion apparel industry, the departure of Japan Airlines, small businesses biting the dust, among others. It has created a severe structural imbalance in what the local government collects annually, forcing must-cut operations expenses. It’s a gloomy scenario, no matter how you splice, slice or dice it.

My peers have seen worse in the early ’60s. But we were fortunate then to be armed with strong resiliency—our traditional ways—returning to subsistence living and enduring the hardship that we had to face. It provided the opportunity to learn traditional living founded on communal sharing in farming and fishing. We walked behind our parents at dusk (after several hours of pull net fishing) or returning home on foot from the family farm. Those were the golden days we revisit occasionally in quiet nostalgia, fully wary too that we can’t turn back the hands of time.

In recent months, even the Legislature engaged in lively debate over the real need to proactively seek revenue generating economic activities to scaffold business closures over the last decade. Obviously, it is wary that we can’t let doom and despondence rule the day when crushed in the devastation of a global financial meltdown. In brief, we must rally behind making this happen for the sake of posterity. We can’t simply intone, “Make the world go away”. There has to be a synergistic convergence between the two sectors to ponder upon paradigms that could work. Embracing adolescence or apathy isn’t the answer either.

Amidst the challenges of a global economy sputtering for life, I am reminded of an old Indian adage: “Even a strong tree will fall when a huge storm hits.” Indeed, it is very stormy in the sea of paradise for many families.

But there’s still hope, however faint it may be in the distant horizon. This hardship too shall pass!