In review and in prospect
In the Philippines, behaving like a community is, quite simply, too hard. Filipinos would rather build walls around enclaves built on arbitrarily-located tracts of land all over the city through which alternate traffic routes could’ve been built. We would rather toss, dump and/or flush down our household solid wastes into the city’s many once-beautiful esteros. The Pacquiao Nation would rather pander to the cultural symbolism of their Kings of the Road — the rust buckets that make up our mass transit “system” of jeepneys, tricycles, and kuligligs — rather than entertain the harder but obvious solution of simply tossing all of those contraptions into the junkyard and conscripting their operators into the Army to fight the Chinese. We tolerate public utility buses loading and unloading indiscriminately in the middle of the road — an obvious problem that begs an obvious solution that strangely swamps the intellectual faculties of the country’s foremost “thought leaders”. In short, there is no “Philippines” in the real sense of the notion — only a bunch of arachnids clambering upon one another for a piece of the proverbial bayabas.
So now the rains pour and the floods roll in. Suddenly everyone is “shocked” by how everything goes to hell — as if conveniently forgetting that, rain or shine, Manila traffic is always bad. Because it is so bad and been so bad for so long under normal circumstances we use this otherwise unacceptable but routine normalcy as a baseline for complaining about the relatively worse circumstances abnormally heavy rains bring about. The only solution evident in the horizon in light of these attitudes is the hope that the flooding and 4-hour traffic jams these cause will someday be regarded as the new normal that will serve as the baseline for when new “acts of god” turn the new 4-hour traffic jams into the newly-shocking 6-8 hour Jakarta-style gridlocks of Manila’s future.
Shocked and angered by Manila’s traffic? Well, Filipinos made the bed they sleep on. That, after all, is what “independence” is really all about.
Last week's blog posts
November 26, 2022 by benign0
"The fake quote card bears the markings of Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI), evidence that there may, indeed, be a disinformation campaign being perpetrated by the Opposition camp."
November 21, 2022 by Paul Farol
"On one hand, there is the NIA employee’s side where they claim to be oppressed by NIA Administrator Antiporda. On the other hand, there is Antiporda’s side where he claims that NIA employees complaints is really an attempt to foil his efforts to discipline the ranks..."