From “West Side Story”: “We’ll find a new way of living. . .” In the five-day-old new year, we shall have to find a new way of living with traffic. As a driver, passenger, pedestrian, and taxpayer, my farfetched theory is that if everyone exercised some kind of kindness on the street we’d have less traffic and less stress.
In the words of the Dalai Lama: “Whenever possible, be kind; it is always possible.” TV host Ellen Degeneres says the same thing, “Be kind to one another.”
To be unkind, who’s the maniac in MMDA who’s been scattering those grimy barriers on roads like Quezon Ave. in Quezon City as if they were toys? They appear without rhyme or reason, out of the blue, a string of them in the middle of nowhere, a mad boy-genius’ solution to the traffic problem! And yet they’re nothing more than traffic obstructions, and dangerous at night because they appear without warning, with no lights and no reflectorized paint. How do those toys prevent traffic when they’re a barrier to flowing traffic?
Traffic will never be an old problem. There will always be new cars, drivers, cops, rules and laws, the only things remaining being the same old attitude of the bosses and subordinates at LTFRB, LTO, DPWH, DILG despite the President’s wish to cut the red tape, the queues, and the corruption. (Slow or bad service is a form of corruption.)
What else is new? At last, the old folks’ cure for malaria and asthma, a leaf called tawa-tawa, is now available in capsule form, Tawa2 Plus, “the first FDA-approved traditional medicine of the Philippines,” sold in South Star drugstores. Don’t laugh now, but as an herbal medicine, tawa-tawa fights insomnia and even dengue, ask your doctor.
Ricky Reyes and friends in the business of vanity report that “the biggest epidemic in history” is magnesium deficiency, with 75 percent of the world’s population lacking in “one of life’s three essentials”: water, oxygen, and magnesium. Magnesium, they say, is the newest “miracle mineral” needed for cell regeneration – aha, the magic words of the last decade! Why, that sounds almost like acquiring a younger, healthier body and looking good from scalp to soles. (Jullie Y. Daza)