In defense of cynicism in a time of crisis

MANILA, Philippines -When everything’s been said and most things kept undone, where do you begin writing?

It is at times like these that words lose all their power to describe and make sense of reality. The task to arrange words becomes meager, even petty, compared to the task to rebuild homes, families, and lives. Because really, how far can platitudes get us?

I guess the best example of how words are ultimately useless in this crisis is how the President himself, in a televised speech, used words to announce that we were ready for the typhoon a day before it struck the shores of Leyte. How these words fell so short against the still-rising numbers of the injured, orphaned, homeless, missing, and dead.

At times like these, words are said to be the opposite of action. And those who rant and complain are often relegated to the corner, labeled as “useless,” ordered to “just do your part” and to “shut the f*ck up.” Whatever that may mean is beyond me when I find no meaning in keeping mum on long-standing corruption rooted in manipulating and profiteering from small folk; in a government that concerned itself more with the accuracy of estimates than providing relief; on the naiveties of thinking that we’re “waterproof” and that those who pillaged goods for their survival are guilty of looting.

I remember once, as an adolescent in high school, I asked the infallible National Artist F. Sionil Jose why a lot of his stories had to end on a sad note. He scolded me: “Because it’s a sad reality. Why else?” And with more and more netizens hounding people to “erase all negativity” online, I see F. Sionil Jose’s point and realize how uncritical and blinded people can be by their cozy dispositions. Now is the time to call a spade a spade and to avoid shielding ourselves from the real world outside. Now, we are made to realize that there are people in graver situations than us.

Glossed over

Truth is, these massive storms have been happening year after year, but we’ve glossed over each occasion with a digital meme, a photograph of a tattered Philippine flag raised high amid destruction, or the immense pride we get from donating our lives’ hand-me-downs and small extras. These memes and short-term rah-rahs with their witticisms get us by, but these don’t get us far. Too much of it even brings us down because it keeps us cloistered, thinking never beyond the surface.

While I do understand the immense need for positivity at a time like this — more importantly, the need for action — there is also a need to dig deep and criticize the forces greater than our individual strengths. And with the presence of foreign media, we are forced to examine ourselves from an outsider’s perspective.

Typhoon Yolanda is a call for us to think twice on the big odds we are up against, the problems that assault us every day as a nation, and come up with even bigger ideas needed to face them. These solutions have always been the ones that required us to think beyond relief, beyond investment ratings and political slogans, and caused us to mobilize to a greater sense of nation and society.

With the Aquino administration making every excuse to bring itself down to irrelevance, we see now how being socially aware goes beyond political activity or inactivity. Yes, this government’s response to the disaster may be the worst calamity since Yolanda, but we don’t end at that. We delve deeper and look into the reasons why, for those of us in concrete houses in the imperial city, we don’t need to worry too much about being marooned without aid.

We realize that Yolanda has been a long time coming and we allowed this to happen not simply through climate change. We allow for this to happen in the way we accept that people live in sub-par conditions, just because we have accepted that the world is simply unfair. That we subscribe to this idea of the rich, the landed, and the powerful Manileño deserving to live, and the Leyte fisherfolk deserving to die, is where we fall first. Here, we fail to see how and why the rich are getting richer because the poor are getting poorer.

Typhoons, floods, and earthquakes may be great equalizers. But when we see the Romualdezes and the Aquinos still able to afford time for political dispute amid thousands of people dying of starvation, we recall George Orwell’s lines from Animal Farm, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” So yes, by all means, rage; rage because to rage is to act. These disasters are more man-made than we think.

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