Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The author has not spared any harsh words when it comes to describing just how awful physical infrastructure is everywhere in the Philippines .  The lack of adequate roads and other transportation/communication networks present the country with a severe bottleneck in economic development, scaring off economic activities through prohibitively high logistics costs and lengthy time frame for getting goods and people from point A to B.  Yet we see little investment in the upgrading or maintenance of the already inadequate infrastructure, with even major highways filled with potholes.

Back in the days of backpacking through the European continent during his graduate school days, the author had many doubts about the European Union's ability to forge a common identity for different races and nationalities who answer to different customs, languages, and religions .  Indeed, the thoughts ring even truer today in a continent where diverging economic fortunes among different member states are threatening to tear apart any sort of ideological cohesion based on the pure of "European-ness" that act as the spiritual glue of EU as a supranational concept.

It is 10:30am on one of the main thoroughfare of Metro Manila heading to the southern suburbs.  Except...the thoroughfare was no longer a thoroughfare for cars, but for seemingly endless amount of people and goods moving up and down the slim middle path still left over after informal shops and stands took over most of its two paved lanes.  Hawkers hawked and shoppers shopped, all the way down to the main church of the community at the end of the road, where repeated session of what seemed to be a widely celebrated phenomenon of "Wednesday Mass" is now in full swing.

From almost the day a person is born, s/he goes through a relentless regimen of moral education that that gives her/him a set of guidelines on what is supposed to be the correct behaviors of a person that is integrated into the mainstream society as a law-abiding citizen.  While some of the teaching do lead to a certain degree of rebelliousness where indoctrination actually lead to unintended contradictory effects , the vast majority of people do seem to accept the most obvious of the guidelines (such as that murdering or theft are criminal and rightly punishable) without hesitance.