Numbers
When I started composing this column, I noticed the date which I placed at the top of the article to be rare and somewhat awe inspiring -- 02/20/2020. What numbers! I am not superstitious; neither do I have any leaning on this thing called numerology as perceptibly observed by occult practitioners. But I could not help noticing that the number consists of four zeroes and four twos. If only to put a smile to concerned individuals, whose natal day is today, let me greet them “Happy Birthday”, especially Alburquerque, Bohol Vice Mayor Alexis Fernan R. Simeon.
True to the Off Tangent character of this column, let me veer away from numbers and talk about our country’s association with the People’s Republic of China or its people in frightening Numbers (again) of significant incidents. I am choosing those few that have impacted on the individual lives of Filipinos as well as that of our nation.
Number 1 in the list is a crime against humankind which Public International Law condemns as hostes humani generes. Piracy is such crime. Who would ever forget the name Lim A Hong? Allegedly, he was a notorious Chinese pirate who pillaged many north Luzon villages and in the process killed Filipinos. Written in the pages of our history during the early part of our nationhood, the 15th century, there was no other transnational pirate who raided our communities and looted peace-loving Filipinos of their possessions with unmatched savagery than Lim A Hong. He even reportedly tried to seize from the Spaniards, the control of our then young nation when, in 1574, he sieged the second Spanish establishment. By the way, Cebu was known as the first Spanish establishment.
Number 2. What Chinese Lim A Hong did to individual Filipinos about five hundred years ago pales in comparison to the act of China, a superpower against a pygmy of a republic. While the pirate swooped down on defenseless Filipino villages, robbed them of whatever material wealth and left the wreckage of his plunder, Chinese army has done something worse. Because our chinky-eyed neighbors have absolute military superiority, they just landed their full battle-geared soldiers and awesome war materials on some portions of Philippine territory located in the West Philippine Sea. Totally disregarding good and friendly neighborliness, they erected military facilities thereat and claimed, in complete violation of international law, the Philippine islands to be within their territory.
Number 3. There have been numerous reports of kidnappings in the Philippines where the victims and culprits are Chinese nationals alike. According to this reportage, most of the victims are gamblers who, to be able to pursue their vice, borrow from fellow Chinese. When they are unable to pay their borrowing, their funders have them kidnapped as they demand payment from their relatives in their homeland, China. In short, our national peace is violated by imported violent players.
Number 4. Our Filipino pride must be severely transgressed by the reports that Chinese gambling superstructures operating in Philippine soil as POGOs failed (more likely, refused) to pay correct taxes to our government to the tune of billions of pesos. Gambling is immoral. Why we allow gamblers to come to our country is, by itself, wrong. So that if these reports of failure to pay taxes are true, we can only conclude that our flawed kind of hospitality to the Chinese gambling lords in allowing them to establish this mechanism of vice has been viciously abused.
Number 5. For a long time, sociologists claim that economic necessity drives women to prostitution. True. But if we see the television news footages of the raids conducted by police in Metro Manila where the alleged prostitutes and customers are Chinese, doing their trade in astronomical money schemes, sociologists have to review their academic models.
Number 6. CoViD-19. However this new corona virus broke out, the fact remains that its ground zero is in mainland China such that I need not write about it anymore. Res ipsa loquitor.
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