Filipinos believe they are “victims” of natural disasters because they think those things happen “for a reason”. They don’t. That is why they are called natural disasters. Nature does not select her “victims”. She just does what she does. It’s really nothing personal.
Life on earth is fragile after all. A small change in the chemistry of the atmosphere can easily wipe out entire species as what had happened to the dinosaurs. Just one of several dinosaur eras lasted tens of millions of years. But that amount of time, in the end, did nothing to prevent a mass extinction.
In that context, there is nothing special about Homo Sapiens. Our species have been around for just a couple million years. Other Hominid species like Homo Erectus were around far longer than that and yet they are now extinct. Don’t think Homo Sapiens are so special that we feel entitled to persist on this planet.
It is the same arrogance of our species that made us think we could do as we please with the finite resources of this planet that we now apply to calling volcanic eruptions a “tragedy”. There’s nothing tragic about volcanic eruptions. That’s just the Earth being the Earth.
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The earth is being the earth and Taal Volcano erupted before and yet some Filipinos whom I know have left their children in the Philippines for years, have sacrificed their privacy by sharing an apartment with other families to buy real estate in Talisay, Tagaytay or otherwise in close proximity to a volcano that obviously was going to erupt sooner or later…. Bahala-na doesn’t apply