No, I’m not kidding or hallucinating, I recall reading that there was once a legislator of our Philippine Congress – whom we can also nowadays sometimes refer to as tong-gressman – who once angrily proposed banning typhoons from our shores! This wise guy threatened to declare all typhoons "persona non grata." After the havoc, mayhem and frayed tempers caused by typhoon Milenyo, and the sudden unforgivable postponement of the Ateneo-UST basketball finals of the UAAP, I’m tempted to concur with that crazed legislator’s wild idea even if it sounds utterly Quixotic and idiotic.
The ancient Chinese language gave us the modern-day English word "typhoon," deriving from the Chinese phrase for this natural phenomenon and combining two words – ta meaning "big" or "great" with fung meaning "winds." I used to think of typhoons as huge rain showers and floods, but the recent Milenyo reminded me of its seemingly true essence as a tropical cyclone marked by ferociously strong winds. By the way, before I forget, whenever people comment that I’m now a two-term president of the Anvil Business Club with members who are young Filipino-Chinese tycoons, I tell them categorically that "I’m only a typhoon, not a tycoon!"
As a kid, my younger sister Marilou and I used to jump up and down with glee at typhoons due to the usual no-classes announcement from the government. As a kid, I used to enjoy the loud splatter of nonstop downpours like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and the occasional thunderbolt booms as some sort of music, like an orchestra of nature, which would lull me to cold, cold sleep. But I couldn’t forget also that our late mother would reprimand us, saying that many people suffer during typhoons. Now, as a young adult, I can’t help but remember our mom’s admonition, as I hear, read and see the destructive fury of typhoons.
My apologies to my editor for this late column, which I’m hurriedly writing here in the business center of the Shangri-la Hotel Makati (they’re charging me P670-plus per hour), because the Internet is down all over Quezon City all the way to Manila and even at Hotel Philippine Plaza in Pasay City. Horrors, we’ve been typhooned back into the stone age.
The only consolation I can think of for the frustrating Luzon-wide power failure is that millions of families had intimate dinners by candlelight and must have gone to sleep earlier than usual. That evening of Sept. 28 – which, by the way, was the 2,557th birthday of the great teacher Confucius and was to have been celebrated in colorful ancient rites by the Anvil Business Club in Greenhills, San Juan – was as peaceful and simple as the ancient days of the first Christmas in a stable in Bethlehem 2,006 years ago. It was truly a "silent night," just like the old days before the advent of Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp, Tondo boy Agapito Flores’ fluorescent light (Is this true or just kuwentong kutsero?), Broadband Internet and 24-hour cable TV. Was the simple life of the stone age or even of Dr. Jose Rizal’s era better in terms of quality of life compared to our electricity/technology-driven, but seemingly stressful and confused, "modern" lives?
On the morning of September 28, just as I was reading the Philippine STAR report on President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s proclamation that the Philippines is no longer a Third World nation, but has moved up the ladder to Second World status, electricity in Quezon City and the whole of Luzon suddenly conked out. They would later explain in news reports that the so-called Luzon power grid collapsed, whatever that meant. "Bring us back to the Third World!" I almost wanted to shout out loud.
President GMA should thank her lucky stars that I’m not a disgruntled young military officer or a crafty financier of subversion, for I immediately thought, that night of Sept. 28, that this would be the best time in the world for – what else? – a Thailand-style military coup d’état! News blackout, power blackout, coup! Yes, I’m pulling GMA’s leg, because I just want her to scold her officials and the electricity bigwigs to prevent another Luzon-wide power blackout of this scale and of this length of time from occurring.
How can we even dare claim to be globally competitive, when we can’t even prevent massive power failures, on top of the frustrating fact that it’s a mystery why Philippine electricity rates are the second most expensive in Asia next to Japan. I’m not privy to the details of our electric power mess, but I could smell something fishy there, and their names are "corruption" and "inefficiency." Madame President GMA, if you wish to immediately shore up your record-low popularity ratings, please kick the fat butts of all those responsible for that power blackout and for our atrociously high electric power rates. Kicking their butts on national TV is the most Christian act, since it is now unfortunately unlawful to electrocute criminals and corrupt politicos in our republic.
For all our frustrations with the perennial floods and electric power failures caused by typhoons, I’m innately a positive thinker and I wish to blame our decades-old corrupt politicians for their failure in flood control (Where’s all the zillions in flood control taxes collected from all of us moviegoers for decades?) and for faulty electric power facilities. In reality, even as I have long outgrown my childhood applause for typhoons ("No classes!"), I confess that I still have a love-hate relationship with them.
Why do I also love typhoons? I always tell foreigners that one of the reasons the Philippine archipelago is less polluted and less humid is because we have periodic typhoons that cleanse this republic. I just wish that there would also be a political, economic or even a moral typhoon that would ferociously cleanse the densely corrupt politics, the inefficient economics and often cynical morals of our Philippine society.
Typhoons have a cathartic effect on all of us. On second thought, instead of asking our legislators to outlaw typhoons, perhaps I’ll just pray sincerely to God for His typhoons to please decisively blow away and cleanse our Philippine society of those politicians who mess up our lives.
Typhoons also always remind me that even the most almighty trees planted with weak or shallow foundations are bound to be ripped out of their roots eventually, in the same manner as we human beings with weak moral foundations or with superficial faith in God can be easily be blown away by the many storms of life and destroyed by crises.