Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time Matthew 8:23-27
As Jesus got into the boat, his disciples followed him. A windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, "Lord, save us! We are perishing!" And he said to them, "Why are you afraid, you of little faith?" Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a dead calm. They were amazed, saying, "What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?"
Introductory Prayer:Lord, I come to you in this meditation ready to do whatever it is you ask. Left to myself I often take the easy and convenient path, yet I know the way of a Christian is through the narrow gate. In you, I find the reason to abandon the easy path for a more perfect mission of love. I’m ready to learn the meaning of your command: “Follow me.”
Petition:Lord, grant me the grace of a mature faith.
1. God’s Silence, Man’s Faith:We can imagine ourselves in the place of the apostles, in this poor boat tossed by the turbulent waves. The situation instantly speaks to our worst of fears, yet Jesus sleeps. Our temptation is to wake him…and too many souls do so through complaining incessantly, despairing attitudes, withdrawing from prayer, or unloading anger on others. When in a moment of trial, we find life is no longer under our complete control, the option of meltdown is always at hand. But we mustn’t take that route; instead, we must contemplate the power that emanates from the sleeping Christ. Trials are intended by God to draw us closer to him and increase our dependence on him. We have to live from faith; otherwise, all that reigns is fear, insecurity, and bitterness. The “Silence of Christ” is powerful. To pass over its meaning lightly is to abandon some of the deepest lessons of Christ’s heart. The “Silence of Christ” must teach us.
2. The “Silence of Christ” Speaks to Our Faith:What is Christ’s sleep like? As a young mother, Mary watched Jesus sleep many times. Archbishop Martinez writes: “Jesus was exceedingly beautiful when he spoke the words of eternal life, accomplished wonders, looked with love, pardoned with mercy and caressed with tenderness. But I would like to have seen him while he was sleeping because I could have contemplated him to my heart’s content, without the fascination of his gaze distracting me, without the perfection of his beauty and the glory of his splendor dazzling my eyes and enrapturing my soul. The beauty of Jesus awake is far too great for my smallness. Who could support it? I felt it more suited to me veiled by sleep, as the glory of the sun is more adapted to my eyes when I look at it through a translucent lens” (When Jesus Sleeps, p.15). May I trust the power of Christ just as much when he chooses not to act as when he does.
3. God’s Eternal Pedagogy:Water, a boat, the apostles and Christ… this scene repeats itself over and over again in the Gospel. Water is a symbol of the experiences of life taken on a human level; the boat is the experience of faith on a supernatural level -- it is our life with Christ. Christ’s message is that we can never let our experiences of life overwhelm our experience of faith. We have to live not from the surface level of impressions of the moment, but from the deep channel of faith that reveals the action of God, the wisdom of his Providence and the ultimate destiny of eternity. Faith is what reveals Christ’s presence in our boat; faith is what makes us believe that every wave and wind gust are blessed invitations to confide in the One who rules all. Faith is what permits God to console our hearts, calm our fears and preserve our joy in the midst of problems and difficulties that may take months or years to run their course.
Conversation with Christ:Lord, I know belief makes me vulnerable. But I know that I will not know your love if I do not believe that you can make me happier than I can be by myself. If I do not face the enemies of my soul and my mission and abandon myself to your grace, I will not know your victory.
Resolution:Today I will take a problem and, with complete trust and confidence in him, leave it totally in God’s hands.
A kindergarten student in Havana poses in a doctor costumeENRIQUE DE LA OSA/REUTERS
On public-access TV in 1985, Bernie Sanders defended an element of Fidel Castro’s regime: It was rarely mentioned that Castro provided health care to his country. Sanders grumbled that the same could not be said of then-President Reagan.
The comment came back to haunt Sanders in the wake of Castro’s death. On Sunday on ABC’s This Week, host Martha Raddatz played the old clip and then asked Sanders if he was aware that “this was a brutal dictatorship despite the romanticized version that some Americans have of Cuba.” She reminded Sanders that Castro rationed food and punished dissidents, then hit him with the big question: “So have you changed your view of Castro since 1985?”
Sanders said he didn’t exactly remember the context for his comment (being 31 years ago) but that Cubans “do have a decent health-care system.”
Many consider it more than decent. After a visit to Havana in 2014, the director-general of the World Health Organization Margaret Chan called for other countries to follow Cuba’s example in health care. Years before, the World Health Organization’s ranking of countries with “the fairest mechanism for health-system finance” put Cuba first among Latin American and Caribbean countries (and far ahead of the United States).
Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty. The humanitarian-physician Paul Farmer notes in his book Pathologies of Power that there’s a saying in Cuba: “We live like poor people, but we die like rich people.” Farmer also notes that the rate of infant mortality in Cuba has been lower than in the Boston neighborhood of his own prestigious hospital, Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s.
All of this despite Cuba spending just $813 per person annually on health care compared with America’s $9,403.
In Cuba, health care is protected under the constitution as a fundamental human right. As a poor country, Cuba can’t afford to equivocate and waste money upholding that. This pressure seems to have created efficiency. Instead of pouring money into advanced medical technology, the system is forced to keep people healthy.
It’s largely done, as the BBC has reported, through an innovative approach to primary care. Family doctors work in clinics and care for everyone in the surrounding neighborhood. At least once a year, the doctor knocks on your front door (or elsewhere, if you prefer) for a check-up. More than the standard American ritual of listening to your heart and lungs and asking if you’ve noticed any blood coming out of you abnormally, these check-ups involve extensive questions about jobs and social lives and environment—information that’s aided by being right there in a person’s home.
Then the doctors put patients into risk categories and determine how often they need to be seen in the future. Unlike the often fragmented U.S. system where people bounce around between specialists and hospitals, Cuba fosters a holistic approach centered around on a relationship with a primary-care physician. Taxpayer investment in education about smoking, eating, and exercising comes directly from these family doctors—who people trust, and who can tailor recommendations.
The system requires around twice as many primary-care doctors per capita as we have in the U.S., made possible because the country also invested in medical education, creating in 1998 what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called “the world’s most advanced medical school.” Cuba has become known for training not just domestic doctors, but those from around the world—and sending its doctors to help other, wealthier countries when needed. During the recent Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, more than 100 Cuban doctors and nurses were at the front lines.
Castro justified sending so much support with a brutally holistic understanding of disease as a global phenomenon. He wrote at the time: “By completing this task with maximum planning and efficiency, our people and sister peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America will be protected, preventing expansion of the epidemic, which has unfortunately already been introduced, and could spread, in the United States, which maintains many personal ties and interactions with the rest of the world.”
That spirit also underlies Cuba’s vaccination program, implemented in 1962, which has left the country with some of the world’s lowest rates of vaccine-preventable infectious disease.
The much wealthier U.S. also has vaccines and primary-care check-ups, of course. The key difference is that in Cuba, these things are mandatory. They’re seen as akin to doing routine maintenance on a car to keep the warranty valid. If the system is going to take care of people in dire situations, people must also let the system take care of them before those dire situations occur.
This is the opposite of the U.S., where people demand the former but forego the latter. There are costly barriers to primary care and preventive medicine, but showing up at an emergency room is easy.
While Cuba’s situation is far from ideal, it serves as an elegant counterpoint to the three-trillion-dollar U.S. health-care system—which is controlled by corporations (privatized insurance, pharmaceutical, medical-device, and hospital systems) that drive people to pay exorbitant costs (either directly or through taxes). Cuba offers a dire reminder that efficient health care can be provided at much less cost to the people—when the focus is on primary care and prevention.
As Salim Lamrani of Paris-Sorbonne University put it, excellent health care can exist in the absence of wealth “if political will exists to put human beings at the center of the project.”
In that light, Sanders’s comments were valid, then and now. After defending Cuban health care on the ABC show on Sunday, he continued, “the Cuban economy is a disaster.” And then, unequivocally, he added: “No, I do not praise Fidel Castro.”
This exchange highlighted a fundamental barrier to progress in health care. Do you praise Fidel Castro? If you had to answer yes or no, the answer is no. But good and bad co-exist here, as everywhere. The first step is overcoming the human tendency toward ‘all-good’-or-‘all-bad’ dualism. It can be true that Castro did horrible things, and that Cuba’s health-care system is lacking in many ways, and also that there’s much to learn from it.
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It seems that the Yellowtards (the leading faction of the Philippine Opposition rabidly loyal to the Aquino-Cojuangco clan) have lost faith in that very iconic “activist” enterprise that originally garnered them worldwide fame — “people power” street “revolutions”. Nowadays, these snowflakes seem to have lost their edge and are now resorting to legal means to achieve their dishonest ends.
At present one of the legal means they are exploring to oust sitting Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is yet another quaint impeachment circus. Apparently that other legal means to achieve the more noble end — actually winning an election — does not seem to work for them either having, this year, again sampled what it feels like to cop a catastrophic loss at the polls.
An impeachment bid against Duterte would have made sense had the Yellowtards succeeded at taking over Congress in this year’s elections. Unfortunately for them, they suffered an epic fail getting the required bums on seats there thanks to the tiresome, ill-thought-out obsolete approach they applied to their lame campaign. Ironically, former President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III could be counted as a key innovator when it comes to dishonest impeachment projects having successfully mounted a successful coup against no less than a sitting Supreme Court Chief Justice, the late Renato Corona, back in 2012. Tragic that his spawn of “thought leaders” could not run with that template. Peping Cojuangco must be really frustrated.
Peping Cojuangco can’t find good household help nowadays!
Thing is, the Yellowtards themselves are responsible for the decline of their once illustrious political brand. We see the same limpdicked attitude today in their lack of courage to call for the same “people power” they keep waxing poetic about in their numerous Yellow shrines and memorials. To be fair, they did one too many back in the mid-2000s when their matriarch, former President Cory Aquino, was still alive. Back then, Aquino presided over several more attempts to incite “people power” after the last successful one in 2001 that saw the ouster of then President Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada. All of them failed, as People Power Fatigue crept into the public sentiment of a people increasingly becoming disillusioned with the empty promises of a discredited narrative.
The more important point to make, having pointed out all that, is that the Opposition continue to lack any semblance of an alternative path forward. All they have in their arsenal is a worn-out Martial Law Crybaby narrative, use of nebulous hifallutin’ notions of “human rights” and “equality” as fodder for their lame campaigns, and a pathetic dependence on Western liberal “journalists” for PR capital. But as far as (1) a roadmap to (2) some sort of vision, the Opposition’s top honchos propose neither. This is thanks to their continued latching on to the Yellowtards for “leadership”. Leadership, in that regard, goes nowhere beyond ouster rhetoric which means focusing on tearing down rather than building upon the current government’s inertia.
The best way the Yellowtards can prove to the Filipino people that they mean business is through a great show of power. What better way to do this than to show that their old magic still works? That’s the challenge they need to step up to if they choose to continue acting and thinking like Yellowtards. Then again, the better alternative is to evolve into a more modern and more intelligent political force. That, of course, is premised on an ability and resolve to accept that Yellotardism had become a liability to their cause.
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There was a commenter here on GRP who said Pinoys hate Leni Robredo more than they love Duterte.
This is a very important point that I think Duterte himself doesn’t understand.
The anger against Leni Robredo is not about Duterte. Rather, it is a burning, overflowing rage against a clueless but ambitious puppet who has become the biggest, most shameful symbol of fraud, hypocrisy, injustice, and impunity in the Philippines.
Robredo’s continued illegal occupancy of the office of the vice president reminds Filipinos every day that:
– It is okay to steal government funds and rig an election to install an incompetent non-entity into the second-highest government position in the land.
– It is okay for said non-entity to fraudulently peddle herself to the public as an accomplished “lawyer” and bureaucrat. (Robredo may have passed the bar after three tries, but when you listen to her talk, it’s obvious she didn’t actually practice her profession to a reasonable degree. The yellows branded her a “lawyer” the way they branded Noynoy Aquino an “economist” simply because he studied economics in Ateneo.)
– It is okay for said non-entity to use half a billion pesos of taxpayers’ money to bankroll her social life and promote personal agenda by posing for magazines, cutting ribbons, holding yoga classes in her office, giving self-serving speeches, attending events, and jet-setting all over the Philippines and the world with her lover the congressman.
In short, Robredo reminds Pinoys every day, with her smug tarsier smile, that CRIME PAYS.
And Duterte is tolerating it.
This is why Pinoys are getting angrier by the day.
The one thing that will destroy Duterte in the eyes of the Filipino people is not the ICC, or the EU, or the UN, or the black propaganda of the local and international media.
It will be his failure to avenge the honor of the Filipino people against the gang rape that was done to them by Robredo and the Liberal Party when they stole the elections with taxpayers’ money, and got away with it.
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THE claim that President Duterte should be impeached for not restricting our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from foreigners is so absurd that it is astonishing that media has given it mileage at all, with even otherwise sober commentators believing that rubbish.
What is disgusting is that the two men mainly responsible for spreading this nonsense—Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio and Aquino 3rd’s foreign secretary Albert del Rosario—cannot not know that they are misleading the public, as I will show in the course of this piece.
Why are they doing so? Because of an ideological hatred for China, and an added factor for del Rosario, to cover up for his role in our losing Bajo de Masinloc (also known as Panatag or Scarborough Shoal) in 2012 to China. The Yellows are cheering them and repeating their yarn of course because they think they can pull down Duterte’s popularity by stoking the embers of anti-Chinese racism among Filipinos.
At the outset, we have to emphasize first that Duterte was referring not to our EEZ in its entirety but only to Recto Bank (Reed Bank) within which he said we cannot ban Chinese fishermen. His comment was in the wake of protests over the sinking of a Filipino fishing boat by a Chinese vessel – whether it was a deliberate case of ramming or an accidental collision hasn’t been established.
Our huge EEZ (in red). Everyone except us banned there? (Source: marineregions.org)
Recto Bank is indeed within our 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and whose natural resources therefore we have the sovereign rights to exploit. (Let’s leave out of this discussion the other fact that Recto Bank is also within the area we claim as territory, the Kalayaan Island Group, but which China, Taiwan, and Vietnam also claim.)
Fire-eating
What the Yellow demagogues, and the two fire-eating anti-China haters do not mention because it would immediately shatter their propaganda tack, and what many commentators astonishingly are so ignorant about, is the following.
Our EEZ that includes Recto Bank is partly in an area which three other countries (and Taiwan) have declared as their sovereign territories, decades before 2009 when we drew precise geological coordinates for the zone through the so-called Baselines Law.
We call this area the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG), which Marcos named as such when he declared it part of Philippine territory in 1978. For China it is their Nánshā Qúndǎo, part of Hainan province; and for Vietnam, Quần đảo Trường Sa, part of its Khánh Hòa province. Our EEZ also overlaps a similar zone and the territorial sea of three other countries – Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia – and Taiwan.
China occupies two features that is within both our EEZ and KIG, including the most well-known Mischief Reef. It has five more outside our EEZ but within the KIG. Vietnam occupies five within both our EEZ and KIG, and an additional 9 within our KIG but outside our EEZ. Malaysia occupies four, three of which are in the KIG. (See accompanying map.)
Mind-spinning these may be, the point is this: We cannot and have in fact not been able to ban from this area in our EEZ—the KIG— citizens from countries which also claim it as their sovereign territory. How difficult is it to understand that?
Say, you have title to a property adjacent to your residence, and you shoo away people who are planting kamote there to make use of it. But then somebody else comes and claims it as his property, shows you his title, and says those people are his relatives he gave permission to plant. Do you quarrel with him, even hire goons to throw out those people?
Metaphor’s limits
This metaphor has its limits though since in the case of the Spratlys, China, Vietnam, and Taiwan claim it is their sovereign territory. And unlike property disputes among individuals within one country and therefore bound by that nation’s laws, there is no super-state, i.e., no court to determine which “title” is genuine or fake.
It is impossible for Carpio to not know all this. He had declared in 2011: “Under traditional international law typology, States acquire territory through occupation, accretion, cession and prescription, not by executing multilateral treaties (such as UNCLOS that issues guidelines for defining an EEZ.” He wrote that ponencia in an August 2011 decision upholding the constitutionality of the 2009 baselines law that in effect defined our EEZ. Or was it just his staff who wrote it, that he didn’t bother to read?
Three other countries are already in our EEZ, and have been for more than a decade. (Source: “The West Philippine Sea: The Territorial and Maritime Jurisdiction Disputes a Filipino Perspective, A Primer.)
In fact, what Duterte is saying is exactly what Carpio proposed right after the arbitral panel’s ruling in 2018: “The ruling says that Scarborough Shoal (which is within our EEZ) is a traditional fishing ground of Filipino and Chinese fishermen. So, both can fish there,” he said. “The Philippine government should talk to China and establish protocols so we can fish in peace,” he said.
Why is he saying now that Duterte is violating the Constitution for allowing Chinese fishermen to fish in an area in our EEZ which China claims is their territory?
Constitution
Yes, the Constitution mandates the President to protect our EEZ. But it is absurd, or downright stupid, to claim that a Philippine president is violating the Constitution when he cannot stop foreigners’ activities in, or kick foreigners out of our zone, when they also claim it as also theirs.
Carpio exhorts us not to call the Spratlys a “disputed area.” But the entire world calls it that. Even the world’s superpower, the US, has not recognized our claim to the Spratlys, with its Navy manual on territories in the world saying: The US does not take a position on territorial disputes in the Spratly Islands.
In 2011, Aquino authorized an energy firm of the Indonesian-owned First Pacific Co. (the source of wealth of his foreign secretary del Rosario) to explore for oil and gas in an area in Recto Bank. In March, two Chinese maritime surveillance vessels forced out of the area the survey ship MV Veritas Voyager that the company had contracted to find out where to drill appraisal wells. The vessels claimed the area was Chinese territory and the Voyager did not have permission from its government for its activities there.
Did anyone claim that Aquino violated the Constitution for not sending our Navy to escort the ship so it can undertake its surveys?
Then the next year, because of del Rosario’s gullibility in believing what a US assistant state secretary—several ranks below his stature—told him, we lost Bajo de Masinloc, which is of course within our EEZ.
Why didn’t they or anyone claim that Aquino should be impeached for not kicking out the Chinese from a shoal within our EEZ?
Other than the fact of course that the Yellow Cult was in complete control of media then, there was no way for Aquino to grab back Bajo de Masinloc except by force, which the UN Declaration categorically bans.
In these two cases, del Rosario himself was witness to how a president could not restrict China from a part of our EEZ it claims it owns. Why is he now alleging that Duterte is violating the Constitution by allowing Chinese to fish in Recto Bank?
Or does he want Duterte to do what Aquino stupidly did in 2012, which was to send a warship to arrest Chinese fishermen in Bajo de Masinloc. Well that ended up in our losing territory that at least we could say we controlled since Spanish times.
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THE claim that President Duterte should be impeached for not restricting our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from foreigners is so absurd that it is astonishing that media has given it mileage at all, with even otherwise sober commentators believing that rubbish.
