I guess it’s still too early to tell, but it seems the people and, yes, their officials seem to have finally learned the painful lessons taught by Yolanda and applied them to Ruby. It probably helped that Ruby was less devastating than Yolanda, adjudged as the strongest typhoon to ever make landfall in this country’s storm-battered history; but overall, I think that preparedness and information were a lot better now than merely one year ago.
But I still have a problem with President Noynoy Aquino saying late last week that the media was being alarmist in its warnings about the coming of Ruby. If media helped force the people and their officials to prepare for storm surges and suchlike, then it was all for the good.
If Yolanda has taught us anything, after all, it’s that it is always better to be over-prepared than to be caught sleeping in the proverbial noodle factory, as the Tagalog expression goes. Perhaps, in the future, everyone should show the same sense of heightened awareness and preparation for every typhoon, regardless of whether or not a President says the warnings have gone overboard.
Ultimately, no one can really say for sure what damage adverse natural phenomena like typhoons or even seasonal monsoon (“habagat”) rains will bring. And because our physical infrastructure and disaster-response resources are just barely adequate for even the most benign of calamities, it is always good policy to not rely on government in the face of such upheavals.
This is, after all, a country where even one stalled vehicle on Edsa can cause a monstrous traffic jam that will throw the lives of tens of thousands of people out of whack. And because we now have a government that apparently does not believe that spending for infrastructure is a priority, it will take years under other, more enlightened administrations to help the vast majority improve the quality of their lives through stronger, more calamity-resistant roads and bridges—or even a system of quicker and better-prepared disaster response.
(Speaking of which, I thought the Aquino government’s plagiarized—from the Hurricane Katrina rehabilitation effort—motto of “build back better” was supposed to help people in Tacloban and other Yolanda-hit areas survive future typhoons? Why did the houses built for them collapse like they were built of matchsticks when confronted with the lesser wrath of Ruby?)
We were lucky this time around, but we were also better prepared. We can’t be lucky all the time, but we can always be as ready as we can be.
* * *
A palace spokesman has urged the citizenry not to judge Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas too harshly after a photograph showing Roxas falling down on the job, as it were, went viral in the social media. The photo of Roxas taking a spill on a motorbike in Samar, where he was supervising preparations for relief work at the height of typhoon Ruby—without the required helmet, as netizens quickly pointed out.
The meme-generating Roxas picture was quickly followed by a bogus news item published in a satirical Web site saying that the secretary’s wife, broadcaster Korina Sanchez, had been declared persona non grata in Japan by no less than Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for wishing in a recent newscast that perhaps the typhoon should spare the Philippines and go to Japan instead. Sanchez, of course, had been publicly ridiculed for belittling on-site reports filed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Tacloban City during super-typhoon Yolanda.
What is it with typhoons and the high-profile Roxas couple, anyway? And why are Roxas and his wife so easily, mercilessly and believably made into objects of online ridicule when—as one political analyst once noted—more educated and relatively more affluent online communities should be their natural constituency?
My guess is because Roxas and his wife are trying too hard to use their respective positions to win over voters in the coming presidential elections. And because neither of them will publicly admit to seeking to become the next First Couple—while so desperately and oftentimes pathetically working to become just that—they fail.
The Internet-savvy section of the populace, after all, is more difficult to fool using the traditional “epal” techniques employed by politicians like Roxas. Regardless of the number of gullible people who were bamboozled into believing that Abe truly banned Sanchez from ever entering Japan, netizens are still less prone to believe the faux-populist gimmicks that rich-kid Roxas and his middle class-born wife shamelessly use to project themselves as the next simpatico ruling couple of this still-poor country.
More than anything, I think most Filipinos—rich or poor, online or not— detect in Roxas and his wife a fakery that no amount of forced empathy is going to gloss over. I guess some people just exude compassion better, regardless of their roots—or, at the very least, are more convincing in fooling the people that they do.
Roxas and his wife simply ooze arrogance and sham populism. And no amount of “epal” is going to convince the people otherwise.
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