Now or never!

The current, critical fiscal crisis and the recent landslides and flashfloods that cost a thousand lives and untold damages are not a curse or a punishment from God. They are man-made-disasters — the unconscionable consequences of man’s inhumanity to man, and his acts of violence against nature.

Let us once and for all admit before God that our country is guilty of widespread corruption of all kinds, in all levels, local and national. This is a major cause of our national economic crisis.

Let us likewise admit before God that this is also at the root of what caused the nationwide tragedies during and after the recent typhoons. Massive illegal logging and deforestation are crimes against humanity. When we violate the laws of nature as God had intended them to be, nature cannot but hit back with a vengeance. Forests are meant by God to be forests, and not to be denuded. They are meant to protect those in the lowlands.

This Season of Advent, as last week’s and this week’s liturgical readings have been reminding us, is a call to repentance, to a conversion of heart. The prophetic voice of John the Baptist keeps ringing in our ears. This may very well be the last call to go back to the ways of God as a nation, if we are to experience the true meaning of Christ’s coming.

EDSA 1 and EDSA 2 were not enough. We keep going back to our old ways as a "damaged culture." Now is the time to make a definitive breakthrough. Now or never! We cannot do this by just going down on our knees and offering verbal prayers and lighted candles. With God’s presence within us, we need to make radical moves and decisive action.

Let us fully support the long-standing proposed total log ban for at least twenty years, and the needed, on-going reforestation of critical areas in our country. As Sen. Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. accurately stated: "Unless the government implements a total log ban, we will continue to lose more of our already thinning forests, and the horrible tragedies in Aurora-Quezon this year and in Ormoc in 1991 due to flashfloods and landslides are bound to be repeated."

On her part, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has endorsed to Congress the immediate passage into law of the proposed total log ban. Added to this is the recent appointment of retired Gen. Victor Corpuz as anti-illegal logging chief. Illegal loggers must be duly prosecuted and the reforestation program must be urgently implemented.

Side by side with all this is our hope for the future, especially among our youth and compassionate citizens, whose hearts and consciences are the very opposite of those criminal, illegal loggers.

Toto and Baby Malvar, an exemplary couple, are involved fulltime in a massive reforestation project at Mount Puro, Antipolo, since 1992. By the year 2000, over a 900-hectare forest site, they had planted at least 700,000 seedlings and trees, which they are maintaining and protecting, together with the native Dumagats and other upland residents. Community-building is integrated within the reforestation program, as led by the Malvar family.

A more recent experience I had was just a couple of weeks ago, at the very lobby of our Loyola House of Studies, during and after the typhoons.

Through the appeals of our Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan and the Ateneo Task Force Noah, donations of relief goods were literally non-stop in coming in. And our Ateneo college student-volunteers, together with our Jesuit scholastics, re-packed them in bags — from food, to bottled water, to clothes and blankets. Truckloads of these were then brought to disaster areas, mostly to Nueva Ecija and Montalban. All this was being done morning, afternoon, and evening.

At the height of it all, I did not know what to admire more: the spontaneous generosity of the donors, or the zealous energy of the young packers.

Yes. There is a Maka-Diyos side of us, Filipinos, that must continually resist and triumph over un-Godly forces, like those illegal loggers, who may also be led to the ways of God, if they choose to be helped. Let us reach out to them, as the Lord would want us to.