Choking up our City

Our own perverted view of ourselves and of the world continues to choke up our city.

Take the case of my favorite neighbor. My neighbor, whom we can call Xman, has his own justification for building his junk shop beside a creek where all members of the neighborhood pass through to check their water pipes upstream.

“Look at Brookside (a village in Baguio), all houses and shops crowd both banks of the river,” Xman retorted, when reminded of a Department of Environment and Natural Resources policy, which bans any structures within six meters from a creek or river. He typifies the ‘everybody-is-doing-it-and-the-government-is-not-implementing-its-laws anyway’ disease, which has infected many of us. No wonder many of us have become incapable of making a positive dent in our community even in our own little way.

Xman could be credited for engaging in the business of buying and selling junk – from bottles, plastics and papers to scrap metal. He is actually helping recycle what would have ended up at a garbage dump, thus reducing wastes and maximizing resources.

But he built his junkshop at a place where it should not be. His junkshop is choking up the creek and has practically blocked the whole neighborhood members’ passage way to their water sources upstream. The whole neighborhood has been using the passage way for decades. But Xman and his family arrived in the neighborhood just two summers ago and started appropriating for themselves the community’s path way. Where in the world have you seen this? In our culture back home, we cannot just do this because of our culture of bain. Other cultures have their own hiya. But Xman seems to be lacking in this.

Xman began his junkshop business without first surveying where to properly put it. He and his family came to the neighborhood and made sure their presence was felt by making life inconvenient for their neighbors.

Xman also had a junked jeep, which has been permanently parked beside the public road a few meters from where he and his family now live. That space and part of his junkshop used to be where young boys in the neighborhood played basketball at a single basketball ring. The space also used to be where cab drivers would maneuver when they would bring passengers to our neighborhood. Xman appropriated all these spaces for himself.

Xman must be making good business because just recently he acquired a second-hand or third-hand pickup truck. The truck is now parked on one side of a bridge also not far from Xman’s home. When asked if he could do something so the truck wouldn’t obstruct traffic, he boastfully retorted: “Why are you complaining when you have no vehicle?”

His message is clear: those who have no vehicles in the neighborhood have no right to complain against Xman, who has appropriated again for himself another big chunk of a nearby bridge.

So how can you solve a problem like Xman? Frankly, I don’t know. You try to talk it out with him but you discover he and you have different wavelengths. His line of reasoning defies everything that is ethical. A Bayani Fernando in our village or in the city might know. Unfortunately, we don’t have a Bayani Fernando here.

Xman’s case is amusing. He typifies the person who has nary any sense of community or sensitivity to the rights of others. Parking his pickup truck and another junked jeep on a public road and expanding his junkshop beside the creek must be his way of flaunting what he has materially.

People from other provinces, including us, come to this city to seek livelihoods we cannot find back home. This city may not be the hometown of our birth so we may not have a close affinity to it. But this city is also our home. Home is where our family is. And since this city is our home, it is expected of us to help in our home’s good housekeeping.

But our experience with Xman and how some enterprising people have appropriated sidewalks for their vulcanizing or auto-mechanic shops and other businesses even at the heart of the city continue to show us that we no longer treat Baguio as our home. Apparently, we are treating the city like a lemon, which we can squeeze dry or a cow that we can milk to our hearts’ content without taking care of the lemon tree or the cow.

Such attitudinal or behavioral disease of people plus the apparent lack of political will of officials to implement laws are creating a disaster now choking up our city.