S1L17 – How the public is being hypnotized into surrendering BENECO
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.
What this old adage means, to me, is that men obtain power because they see what others cannot.
A more cynical expression of this is men obtain power by preventing others from seeing.
In practical terms, when somebody is trying to acquire anything of great value, his first agenda is to keep people unaware of that value. Succeeding in that, he meets little resistance to the rest of his agenda.
Reading some of the comments to my posts about BENECO, it greatly saddens me to read feedback like, “I am neutral on this BENECO issue. All I care about is that their service remains efficient.”
I hear this not from ordinary people. I hear it from public officials and leaders in the private sector.
Somebody is succeeding famously in keeping many Baguio and Benguet residents blissfully unaware, indeed.
This rich Davao business group heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry wants to acquire BENECO. They can see something Baguio-Benguet residents cannot see—and are working to make sure they never see it.
They see the inevitable demise of fossil fuel. Taking its place they see the ELECTRIC FUTURE.
At the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Climate Change Conference this week in Glasgow, Scotland the future of the planet was laid bare. Unless we eliminate—not just reduce—fossil fuels to achieve net-zero hydrocarbon emissions by 2035, our planet will enter the next global climate epoch called the “Self-Destructive Phase.”
It will happen in geologic time scale, of course, not in our lifetime but in the lifetime of our children, and their children and so on. But when it does, NOTHING we do can stop the downspiralling death throes of our home, Earth, and the extinction of our human race ultimately.
Am I trying to scare you? I certainly hope so, but I don’t need to. We are all living through the evidence of the effects of climate change. Typhoons are getting more severe, melting glaciers are raising the sea level. Many coastal barangays in Cavite, Navotas, Malabon and even as far up north as Dagupan, Pangasinan are now permanently under water.
Hotter air makes forest fires commonplace and droughts epic. And yet when it pours, even places in La Trinidad, Benguet that have never known flooding in the past have to get used to it now.
The only way to dial weather extremes back to tamer proportions is to REVERSE global warming. The only way to achieve that is to eliminate fossil fuels by retooling the entire human industrial civilization to power up using clean energy.
In short, faster than you think, soon anything that has moving parts must be powered by electricity.
Rich Arab oil sheiks will soon be a thing of the past. They will be replaced by electricity tycoons. Those future electricity tycoons are just average, mediocre businessmen today but not for long.
At the rate Baguio-Benguet residents are being manipulated right now into giving up their electric cooperative—the hub of all power-related development in the future—they will soon ignorantly hand it over to this Davao business group for a song. All their moves are well camouflaged that the average Baguio-Benguet resident thinks this whole “BENECO-NEA war” is just one of those things involving people who are “politically-motivated.”
If religion is the opiate of the masses, that lazy term “politically-motivated” is the placebo of the masses. You hear people hurling that phrase around everywhere. When some issue is too challenging to understand, many find refuge in dismissing the whole affair as “politically motivated.” It saves time and effort analyzing things, and yet makes the most ignorant person sound profound—“politically motivated lang yan.”
That’s how people with 20/20 stereoscopic vision gouge their own eyes, to be the blind subjects of the one-eyed.
How would life be like for Baguio-Benguet residents when all aspects of their economic life is under the thumb of an electric tycoon?
Ask the happy citizens of Saudi Arabia what a wonderful life it is to have oil sheiks owning everything, only condescendingly allowing a few morsels to trickle down to the general community, from time to time.
Decades from now, when electric vehicles of all kinds, including some that might actually hover in the air as casually as anything, are lining up at electric charging stations, these “neutral” people will fight back tears as they wistfully remember the BENECO of old and tell their grandchildren, “you know, apo, I used to be an OWNER of that enviable electric company…”
“What happened, Lolo?”
“I was too lazy and dumb to fight losing it.”
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”