G-SPAT

Progress ruined Baguio – no more progress please
by Grace Bandoy

If you are a true blue Baguio baby, you would hate Baguio today. I do - a Baguio girl to the bones and I hate what’s become of our city.

Sure there’s nowhere for Baguio to go but the city it is now. Every place on earth has to become progressive and “citycized.” We cannot be a humble barrio forever. Baguio should be developed and made a hotshot city. Those are all the shitty stuff we were made to believe. And boy did we fall into it all.

Now Baguio is progressive but we are not happy at all. We are sad because the progress we thought was good was the very same thing that ruined our beautiful city. And we can’t bring the same old pretty Baguio back.

It’s really sad, it can even be depressing sometimes. A day doesn’t pass when I walk around our streets and don’t ask how Baguio ever became like this.

Baguio is so small. One can ride around the whole of Baguio in three hours, walk around it in seven hours. Baguio people know almost everybody else. You go to church on Sunday at the Baguio Cathedral and you run into all your friends and relatives and neighbors and crushes.
You walk around Session Road and you bump into all your schoolmates. It was a very friendly city because everybody seemed to be friends or acquaintances. Now you go around Session Road and it would be a miracle if you run into someone you know, even if you walk around there everyday. Strangers dominate our streets, they have outnumbered the original Baguio occupants. They even act like they own Baguio.

I really hate it in here right now. It has become over populated. All our mountains and forests and water reservation areas have been sold to rich a -- holes who have the money to build huge houses on them. All our raw lands are being made into subdivisions with houses and houses everywhere. And to top that are the gazillions of vehicles producing deadly smoke rule our streets.

Baguio’s sidewalks are overflowing with beggars and pickpockets and perverts. There’s no room to breathe in the central business district – what with all the malls and pollution and sidewalk vendors and countless shops and dense inhabitation.

Now, we are fast-becoming like Manila – center of pollution, hang out of beggars and squatters and criminals, hub of city-living-hungry people, mall rats, Muslim communities, punks, etc. – a melting pot of people from everywhere who don’t care whether they’re making Baguio a better place to live in – they just don’t care if Baguio is dilapidating as long as they’re living in here.
We need to preserve the very few natural beauty Baguio is left with. No more malls, no more cutting of trees, no more building of overpasses and flyovers, no more selling of lands and mountains.

We’ve had enough of that shitty thing called progress already. Stop progress now. If you love this city don’t vote for those who want more progress for Baguio – Baguio doesn’t need progress at all, not anymore.