Calamity Struck – Hard!

On September 26, 2009 – the worst rain fall (a whole month’s worth of it) in decades was experienced by Metro Manila in just less than 24 hours. This led to hundreds of people dead and hundreds of millions worth of damage to real and personal property. The result was a city in chaos at its finest. Cars were tumbled over each other, strong currents pushed aside everything in its path, thick mud was everywhere, people trapped by gushing waters – stranded on the rooftops of their homes. And more importantly the biggest whiplash is the pain, the suffering, the unspeakable horror that most people in Manila had to go through.

How can such a disaster even happen to the most developed cities of the Philippines? How come the PAG-ASA was not able to foresee the amount of rain this typhoon “Ondoy” was about to bring? How come a day before this tragedy the international stage saw that there would be massive floods that will unfold, yet we did not heed?

There are so many “How” questions more than the “Why’s” to this tale. Because aside from the fact that we already know the answer to most of the “Why’s”, it just looks like no one seems to care at all. This was an obvious brew of poor city planning and lack of social/environmental awareness. People would always debate that it’s only natural that we become reactive to the things that are improbable – but wake up! Typhoons are not shrouded by uncertainty, it is not something we cannot prepare for, and lastly, this was never new to us!

The Philippines has come to a point that majority of the population just do not care anymore. We are in this false state of being infallible, sheer apathy against the country we were taught to love and swear to fight for. But where are we now? Apparently, 90% of people I know would want to work abroad in a heartbeat and close to 75% would want to migrate somewhere else with their family and relatives – isn’t this an indication enough that our country sucks big time? I even heard the daughter of the former President Cory Aquino, Kris Aquino say, “Bilib talaga ako sa mga Pilipino, kapag merong kalamidad tulad nitong si Ondoy, ay talagang nag tutulungan tayo.” But is this how we truly measure our values and strength of character now as a nation? That we have to wait for natural and man made catastrophes for us to stand up to the plate? Then when all is said and done, we go back to our lazy-ass selves?

If there is one message that all of these misfortunes would want to tell us, it is that we are not seeking for ways to improve but we just keep moving forward. Kaizen, as the Japanese would coin it, is advocating for the continuous hunger for the need of improvement. Sadly, Filipinos as we are, we dubbed this as “Kasi eh…” or “because uhmmm…” which connotes a cheap excuse and a refusal to accept responsibility. As a nation, we continue to find the easy way out and end up learning nothing because our fate as a Filipino is only as good as the efforts we put into it – which in this case, sad to say, isn’t much.