Self-inflicted

When the rain turns into a downpour, I sit on my balcony overlooking the common parking area of this public housing complex.

I do this to observe all the flotsam drifting towards the main water drainage. Within minutes, the trash clogs the drain and a flashflood happens. Many times, over the past few years, the flashflood managed to submerge my car.

I have since learned to park my car on high ground when rains are due, the longer walk home and the persistent danger of burglary notwithstanding. Sometimes, when the flooding has already happened, that walk involves the discomfort of wading barefoot on cold and dirty water.

The matter of flash flooding I have raised with the neighborhood association many times. After some digging and flushing and a lot of poking into the pipes, it was concluded that there was nothing wrong with the drainage system of our neighborhood.

But there was something grossly wrong with the neighborhood.

And so I sit on my balcony constantly, watching cars drown in murky water like soldiers dying in an avoidable war. For this is an unnecessary calamity.

If each of us stuck our candy wrappers in our pockets, carried a foldable ashtray for our cigarette butts and disposed of household trash properly, the repeating calamity would not happen. But somehow there is a disconnect somewhere in our cultural psyche. We insist on dumping the trash that will cause the floods that will make our lives miserable.

My parking lot is the microcosm of my society.

Which is why sitting on my balcony during heavy downpours is an extremely rewarding act of social scientific contemplation. The poor souls who rush to rescue their cars in heavy rain or who wade through disease-bearing floodwaters are the very culprits for this redundant crime.

Like a scene from Groundhog Day, my parking lot floods whenever it rains severely. In the aftermath, we cull from the choked drainage litter of every sort from every household in the vicinity. We sweep muck from our pathways and spend many hours tearing out the carpets of our cars to dry.

How many manhours are wasted, how much expense is incurred in this tragic little parking space every year when the monsoon rains come falling upon us?

It is a calamity that should not even happen if each exercised a little discipline and each behaved with a little empathy for the commons. This is a self-inflicted calamity.

Technical problems, such as digging drainage systems are easy to solve. But altering the self-destructive culture that creates this repeating tragedy is an intractable problem.

In a totally futile act, I have, several times, procured a trash bin to encourage my neighbors – and pedestrians who use the parking space as a Ho Chi Minh trail to the mall –to dispose of trash properly. When the plastic bins are not ignored, they are stolen. They are strange accoutrements from another culture that instantly become objects of curiosity or objects of prey.

We all know the problem. And yet we choose to aggravate rather than alleviate it.

This week, when ‘Chedeng’ crossed Luzon with millions of tons of water, the city shut down. The entire province of Pangasinan was a disaster area. Billions of pesos were lost in terms of idle manhours and damaged property.

And now we are told the calamity was, to a large extent, man-made. Forests were denuded. Waterways were clogged with trash. Sewerage systems were choked with millions of non-biodegradable plastic pieces.

In my hometown of Malabon, the catchbasin of seven rivers was filled and converted into a sprawling estate, home to nothing in particular that could not be located elsewhere. My town is the submerged victim of the inflated edifice complex of another epoch. Each monsoon season becomes a prolonged wake for a town surrendered to the sea.

All of us conspired, one way or the other, through sins of omission and acts of irresponsibility, to bring the calamity of avoidable flooding upon ourselves.

Angelo Reyes, a blunt talking soldier and chief of our disaster mitigation efforts said that much when he seemed to blame the victims for the tragedy. But he speaks the painful truth.

Whenever calamity strikes us in gross fashion, it seems it is always self-inflicted. That hapless ship that struck the Superferry 12 and promptly sank was found to have faulty radar. It was blind in inclement weather. There was not enough of the usual culture of proper maintenance to properly call it seaworthy.

And the whole country, sitting right smack on the path of typhoons, cannot be called storm-worthy.

In anticipation of the coming rains, Bayani Fernando led a truly heroic effort to clear our waterways of trash. Tens of thousands of tons of discard was dug up and trucked out of the city.

But the city flooded anyway. The most heroic effort failed against the unheroic habits of millions.

We are doomed.

We are victims of indiscipline. We are our own worst enemies. We sabotage our own quality of life as a matter of course.

We protest loudly when foreigners say we have a damaged culture. But each day, our systems fail against the force of indiscipline.

In our abundant seas, ships habitually run into each other. And, let us not forget, there is a corpse stuck in the water mains somewhere between Cubao and San Juan. How the corpse got lost there and why it could not be found baffles every foreigner who learns about it. Onli in the Pilipins…

Where will the next self-inflicted calamity strike? Who will be the next idiot to throw a monkey wrench into the works and produce chaos by the smallest act of stupidity?

We are in constant suspense, awaiting the next breakpoint in our horribly fragile systems. We are in constant awe of our own capacity to make our systems not work.

As I watch the trash gather up around the little whirlpool that is created by my own drainage hole when it is working, eventually to choke it and produce a flashflood, I am seduced by the thought that we have made disaster a way of life.