VOICES FROM THE 69TH STREET
Joseph Sylvester Evidente Pampliega

The end of the world?  I don’t know really how you “see” things right now, but things are happening like a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Scary!  The more we think of it – that 2012 is the end of the world – the more it seems to become “the” end of the world.  As far as I can remember, the last time we had an earthquake that strong was in the early 90s and that was because of Mt. Pinatubo boiling up.  Since then, we were just disturbed by “little” tremors reminding us that Mother Earth is alive and kicking, and doing some facelifts.

The more we watch movies, or worst, documentaries that discuss the end of the world, seeing that what was once a possible ancient Mayan conjecture only – a myth to us – is now explained collaboratively by science, showing worst case scenarios that could possibly annihilate our world and of course, humanity.  More so, these documentaries leave us with an open-ended conclusion, leaving it up to us to do what we can do to postpone it, if not prevent it; to prepare for it; or to keep the faith that God will not allow it.

Well, after two days of aftershocks, I can already say it is only in the mind.  You don’t know whether you’re just dizzy or it’s another tremor.  You can practically feel the ground moving under your feet.  You sleep with your senses alert. You get to develop your own Richter scale; more so, re-enhance your animal instincts to predict earthquake. Reports say we are going to experience these tremors a little bit longer.  I guess we get to be “alive, alert, awake, enthusiastic (when we get used to it, I guess)” as the song goes.

But is it really “the” end of the world?  (Cliché.) How can we make sense of this phenomenon, inevitable at that?  We know for a fact that this is a natural event.  Whether there is climate change or not, this is a natural phenomenon Mother Earth should go through.  Once, the earth was just one whole continent, Pangaea.  But because of this natural phenomenon, we come to have the Earth as it is now, with all its topographic features. Just as I have mentioned above, earthquakes are the earth’s way of doing a facelift.  Imagine, she is billions of years old.  She needs to look good no matter what we humans do to her.  We have stressed her out all these years.  What we practically did was accelerate her desire to do just that --- to beautify herself.  Why?  For us.  She has to let out the heat, breaching the epidermis of her skin – the ground – for her to stay beautiful – for us.  To us, it’s a disaster; for Mother Earth, it is “maternal instinct” to stay strong, to stay alive, and to survive!

Our advance technology worsens the possibilities despite the efforts to make one that can postpone or prevent these natural phenomena to take place.  We used up more of what stabilizes the earth to make these things (advance technology), for instance, coal, fossil fuel, etc.  The cost is far greater than what we can profit.  Even water of which was abundant during the time of our ancestors has become a luxury.  What more will it be ten years from now? (That is if the Earth will not end this year).  If we can do something now, we have hundreds of years of human exploitation and abuse to consider. Can we replenish what was wasted all these years? Can we build, if not seemingly “create” or replicate, what we have destroyed?

What can we do?  No matter how science would explain it, we know this is way beyond our control now.  If the people before us knew or better said, understood that, the Earth was a living matter, too; that her life nurtures our life, we might have lived differently.  We might not have considered ourselves “masters” of the Earth; but “essentially part of the Earth.”

This is the original view we have of the world.  Ancient peoples believed they were “essentially part of” Mother Earth. As Larry Rasmussen puts it in his book “Earth Community, Earth Ethics,” “The world around us is also within us.  We are an expression of it; it is an expression of us.  We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it.”  This is what we can do: to see ourselves “essentially part of” Mother Earth.  The tremors we feel since Monday is an expression of ourselves.  This is how troubled we are inside of us.  At the same time, as the ground shakes, we are also shaken; awaken from our indifference and complacency; from our greed for power and wealth.  The world will not end, that’s a fact.

Our Mother will continually rumble and grumble; the ground will simply keep us awake, to keep us all alive, to survive.*