Praise the Lord, because the rains have finally arrived.
And we find moving and gathering momentum towards the festive period. Indeed, no less an authority than the Pope himself has chorus on the subject of the yuletide this year, the pope official verdict is that it will be a "masquerade", given recent world events. Certainly sounds like a few Christmases I spent before. Well thank you for that, my old friend Francis. Why do not you just stick to your job, huh? Just wish everyone a Merry Christmas, instead of bequeathing us such a harmful atmosphere than that left by a fat uncle who polished off too much Brussels sprouts at Christmas lunch.
Fortunately, however, here in Indonesia, things are a bit like the daily probability of precipitation is finally over diddly-squat. Yes, the rains came, and not a moment too soon, as the El Niño effect, coupled with unbridled greed and stupidity, conspired to ensure that a suffocating cloud of smoke the size of the former Union Soviet was released on Southeast Asia.
Apparently, however, according to the current (and unfortunately as a precedent) vice president, only half of the countries fire is not really a national disaster. Half was on fire not be half of what he saw in may also have been a factor here. Although you'd be a fool and a communist to emphasize that if Imperial Java was covered with smoke, so we may have seen a little less drag its feet on the issue.
Fortunately, the apocalyptic flames are now finally be hardened and the country can reflect on a truly terrible year, even by his own standards dismally low. Indeed, Indonesia's fires have pushed atmospheric carbon to levels not seen on this planet for more than 2 million years (400 ppm to be precise) and eventually release about 1 billion tons of the substance the poor old Borneo and Sumatra. Some even claim that this may have actually pushed the planet on a global tipping point runaway warming. In this context, I am not sure that even the inevitable floods of January will be able to wash a sin if apocalyptically terrible.
And Indonesian farmers are trying to pick up the pieces and tend to their cracked, blistered plots as rain ramps through the gears and dryness diminishes. Here in the urban terminus terminal of the Indonesian capital, it was a bit new to using his umbrella again after nine long hot months.
citizens generally have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the rain, and I am sure that by the middle of January, the floods will really start to grate again. We will soon arrive at work looking like drowned baboons, while the notoriously porous ceilings of the country spring leaks and turn to the soggy cardboard and clothes start feeling like a socks driving ojek because " it took three days to dry them.
And that's not to mention the much more serious problems such as landslides and biblical floods. God knows how putative metro stations currently-under-construction of the city will cope with it all. It will be like SeaWorld there.
An image of the flooding of the previous year is forever etched in my brain and involved the table rather ridiculous for a roommate and I are in our underwear at 3am the bailing frantically rainwater our stay with Pizza Hut spaghetti plates empty. Indeed, previous wet seasons have seen my comrades and our shady Landlubber leaking ceilings recreating the World War II film scenes in which the German submarine dives too deep to escape Allied depth charges and rivets start popping out followed by sea water jets and Nazi General Sturm und drang .
In Jakarta, the rains can transform houses in wastewater treatment plants, half hour odysseys trips and excursions to the Homerian local market in the war of mud trenches splashed . Seasonal affective disorder could be about us people, and that is sad.
Hopefully, having just gone through an El Niño / environmental disaster by man, Indonesia will be spared severe flooding this year. Jakarta preparing for such an eventuality, while brief, was hopefully started a few rungs up the ladder of mission critical of previous efforts. There are a few years, I remember the city administration proudly boast of having bought a huge 10 dinghies.
Fortunately, 26,000 dry wells are being dug across the capital for runoff to drain into. Indeed, it is a false economy not to invest in such measures, as during the previous rainy season, Rp.3 billion in losses were inflicted in a single week in Jakarta. These losses, however, whether the result of forest fires or floods, are to be born by the public, while investment aims to mitigate these disasters would have to get out of government budgets and the palm fat foot -A- ground s.
Tsunamis, landslides, fires, haze, drought, floods: a mother nature, so generous to bless this country with such abundant fertility, now turned its back on its Indonesian offspring as a punishment for its excesses rapaciously corrupt and mismanagement of its Edenic heritage? Will we be able to gather as a species and tackle these issues head on? Or the new Star Wars movie win in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds?
In the words of writer Chris Isherwood, the rich world has "retired to live inside [its] own ads. As hermits going into caves to contemplate." And there is a direction in which environmental concerns are now exclusive to feeds that lap before we sign an online petition with suitably furrowed brows and chowing another oil bowl of noodles laced palm trees. Clicktavism they call it.
Thus, we will be able to save Jakarta to be regularly waterboarding by the Almighty? Storming the ramparts of combat fatigues in parliament KPK-logoed and kicking the rotten heap on their beautifully tailored donkeys would be a start maybe.
Maybe the future will resemble the one predicted by the late, legendary Kurt Vonnegut in the pages of his Darwinian prophecy of a novel Galapagos . In the book, the process of evolution by natural selection decisively full on our large human brains. Brains that have brought so much suffering and environmental disasters in the world are represented as having little intrinsic survival value, and are therefore presented as an evolutionary dead end in the book. In the vision of Vonnegut, the homo-sapien gray matter begins to shrink and the body begin to grow fins seal, as we return to the blissful ignorance of oceanic cradle of life.
A bit much? Perhaps, but perhaps only apparently diminishing brain capacity many power holders are a way of early realization of the truth of the thesis of Vonnegut. Maybe their descendants will be already equipped with fins at the Jakarta floods of the future. And here we thought that regional decentralization within the meaning of the policy. Now, pass me a bucket of fish please.