Covid-19 scourge merely ‘preparatory’?

It’s not just in the Philippines. In many places around the world, people don’t take trains and buses to avoid COVID-19 infection. Across Europe, people are even buying old cars for their daily commute. This is bad news for the environment. More old cars on the road will mean more carbon dioxide emissions. Older vehicles are not as fuel efficient as new ones.

But there’s good news. The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted demand for bicycles. Good for the environment and good for health too. This trend is true in many countries. In the Philippines, bike shop owners in Metro Manila say demand for bikes has been stronger than at Christmas. In the United States, bicycle sales saw their biggest spike in the U.S. since the oil crisis of the 1970s.

In a survey conducted by the Institute for Labor Studies, the research arm of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), the use of bicycle came up as a safe and convenient alternative mode of transport during the time of the pandemic. The research is part of DOLE’s Bike-to-Work Project, which aims to assist workers in this time of pandemic by providing bicycles as a transport option or a livelihood opportunity.

Around 85% of the survey respondents said that they use bicycles primarily for its health benefits. Another 82% chose biking as a mode of transport to get to work because of pandemic concerns and limited transportation.

There are some issues though that were raised by the biker-respondents. The presence of bike lanes and road safety are among their foremost concerns. They also mentioned poor road conditions, lack of secured bike parking or storage facility and support infrastructure like shower or change rooms.

Providing bike lanes will take years and billions of pesos to implement but I hope the government will address this. I saw in a recent news report that the newly opened section of the ongoing Tagaytay bypass Road Project has a bike lane. I hope bike lanes will be a standard feature in future road construction.

Incidentally, President Rodrigo Duterte has declared the fourth Sunday of November of every year as “National Bicycle Day” in a bid to ensure ecological integrity and a clean and healthy environment.

Happy and safe biking!

In the 1960’s when an aunt gave way to severe depression, doctors gave her the shock treatment. This I learned from her siblings who described the process as running a sudden bolt of electricity in her body, in what was then regarded as a scientific measure to bring her back to good sense.

The dire prophecies being given to modern-day mystics are like such shock treatment, with decadent

mankind as patient. We all are getting the shock via the terrifying prophecies but, unlike in the case of psychological depression, there has to be a willful reaction for the treatment to succeed.

In the spiritual sense, the success of such treatment is supposed to give us peace and courage to face the hard times to come. Many mystics are saying, however, that chastisement has become imminent, that response to the call for conversion could only lessen, but no

longer scrap the wrath of

Heaven.

Canadian mystic Fr. Michel Rodrigue said in March this year that tribulation would start in the fall of this year (fall is the season in the West that occurs in October and November). If what he said is true, then we are now at the beginning of the tribulation. His prophecy somehow rhymes with what other mystics have said recently: Covid 19 was not

even part of the start of the tribulation, but something like a preparatory stage to the years of chastisement.

Noted Catholic writer Michael Brown is of the view that dire events that have happened this year, 2020, was a preparatory stage that needed response to the appeals from Heaven. But he lamented that “instead of taking stock, and heeding the warning from God — instead of fasting and donning sackcloth — we deny and defy it. We do the opposite of what we should — finding ways still to gorge ourselves

The blame game does not stop with the inquiry that the NIA is to blame for the release of water from dams which inundated the two provinces, Metro Manila and Rizal.

The blame game, at all levels, will not stop.