The Earth’s dream

The vision was not a wish dream. It was stark reality staring me in the face. The 1968 image of the blue orb in space did not have boundary lines conveniently delineated to keep people and nations apart from each other.

Language teachers at U.S. Peace Corps in Muslim Mindanao in the early ’80s claimed that families used to visit cousins in Tawi-tawi and Sandakan, Balabac and Kota Kinabalu, Sarangani and Sangi, gatherings that recalled outrigger travels before Sulu’s Sabah was a glitter in London’s eyes, curtailed after WWII when the edges of the nation-states of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia were defined by the exiting colonial masters.

The West’s decolonizing held to the boundaries of former colonies, in our case that of the British, the Spanish and the Dutch, keeping them intact since economic neocolonialism simply meant a change of personnel to keep the business in place. Basic goods were still produced cheaply for export and financing came from similar sources, save the new signatories had darker skins.

Ateneo U in the ’70s identified 600 families that owned a majority of the Philippine’s assets favored by Vatican’s disposed lands. The same was true of Indon datus and Malay sultans to their own hoi polloi in keeping the land and of the same ratio of the mestizos against the masa in the Philippines. Even today, when the Philippines is no longer the sick man of Asia, and is the second best performing economy next to China in the books, it maintains the old case of poverty at the same dastardly place, and equity parity betwixt the mestizos and the masa remains criminally disparate.

In my lifetime, I was exposed to three civilizational dreams. The first was that of my childhood, if only because I quickly discarded it. This was the European Dream of the Holy Roman Empire that saw Pope Alexander VI in his Inter Cetera declare that Portugal can go east while Spain can go west the year after Columbus completed his first sail to the New World. The British embodied this in the arrogance of “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” Aryan superiority was already in place before the German Nazi’s Holocaust.

My second, the American Dream, began with Thomas Jefferson’s crafted declaration of independence (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (sic) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Right, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness) that led to its rule of the world from the benevolence of “the light on the hill” exceptionalism and manifest destiny, kept the global financial system tied to Wall Street, and the oil spigots maintained from fields dominated by U.S.-led military, technology, and personnel. 

America was the Protestants’ Promised Land, and it enslaved West Africans, distrusted Catholics (from Ireland to Italy), codified immigration against Orientals of which the Chinese Exclusion Act and the pictures in NY Times of brown little brothers newly evolved from the evolutionary tree, were examples. JFK broke the back of the Catholic stigma with his election (as Obama did for “people of color”) and jarred wide open the human side of the slit-eye enigma when he opened the floodgates of immigration. Alas, he was summarily assassinated.

Today, the American Dream emanates from Obama’s counterfeit progressiveness (says Afro-Am Cornell West of Union Seminary, NYC) in his checkered presidency trailed by Hillary’s hope for hers, while the boys of jihad slit the throats of wide-eyed journalists and captives they corral into their mountain lairs.

In the ’80s, Deng Xiaoping revived the China Dream, a third on my list. In its current incarnation—talked about rather than written in text—Xi Jinping proposes three items: 1) 1.4 billion people involved, beyond 80 million members of the CCP; 2) playing field leveled at the urban-rural divide (making houkou registration reform an urgent task) so it does not determine status; and 3) a win-win perspective in global trade that goes beyond short-term gains to long-term benefits for all concerned.

Reality stares us in the face. Why maintain sovereignty lines that are leftovers from another era? The Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis are three political entities that could very well administer their own affairs so why should we insist on boundaries that the Germans, Brits, French, and Dutch delineated, which even strongman Saddam Hussein could not keep intact? Ah, the oil.

Oh, well, my own Earth Dream proceeds from and broadens China’s. My earthrise citizenship involves 7 billion people on behalf of 8.7 million earth species, and counting. It removes the artificial classes of eco-political groups that determines membership to the first, second, third, and other worlds. My value scale is leveled on creatures, not nations. Finally, it requires a win-win situation rather than the lose-lose competition on economic growth. The Earth, dude, and the health of every creature in it: my glocal mission.