Perhaps one of the priceless things in life is waking up to the news that classes are suspended in all levels due to inclement weather. I could not agree more.
Student life is incomplete without such announcements that make us light up like Christmas. Be it before you go to school or when you’re already at school, this would probably be the good news that would make you stop staring out of the classroom window like the familiar scene in animés, ask your seatmates every five minutes why the school isn’t announcing anything yet, continuously persuade every professor for early dismissal, scroll the screen of your smartphone nonstop for updates on #walangpasok until all data is spent.
Who would resist that feeling to just curl up in bed, tug your blanket, hug that fluffy pillow and doze off the whole day with the bed weather? Who would resist coming home to that hearty tuyo and champorado combination, the nilagang baka, sinigang na baboy, tinolang manok, arroz caldo, sopas or the common instant noodles with egg? Although you have to admit that sometimes you don’t go straight home after the suspension of classes. After all, that’s what malls, cafes and other homes where you and your barkada can hang out are for.
Well while you keep on asking for the rain to pour, here are a few things and people you should think of while you’re at it:
1. The flood
For obvious reasons, this is the dreaded part even when there are no typhoons. We have proven this right after summer when heavy rains poured down without any typhoons. The downpour that lasted a few hours already caused the same flood that we experience when typhoons hit our country.
Aside from soaring tuition fees and repression, students nowadays scuffle with the floods that come with the storm. You are wearing your jacket or hoodie with your well-pressed uniform under it, backpack worn in front to avoid being robbed, umbrella on the right hand and your wet shoes and socks with the other one. You won’t need Google Maps to track what alternative route there is to go home from school because all roads lead to España, Taft or wherever in Metro Manila. We’ve become so accustomed to the flood that we’ve already channeled our kabadrtipan to puns via memes. Streets and highways have earned their monikers – Bahamas, Water World, 2012, La Mesa Dam and the list goes on.
Every possible jeepney, taxi, tricycle and makeshift bridges with a five Peso toll fee are already natural to students. Learning and unlearning the art of surviving floods became fast for students thanks to the dozen of typhoons from the Pacific Ocean.
Many just stop and stare whenever they see the miniature version of the Black Sea, mostly for its color, in thoroughfares while trying to go home. Such courage is mustered to brave the flood and go against the tide along with living things (cockroaches and rats) and non-living things (diapers and the likes).
If you’re lucky, you won’t need to traverse the Black Sea but luck is not much of a thing that is often right now for many people. Think about how many people are forced to walk on water while asking for a miracle that the water be divided, if not, disappear. Think of the worker who wakes up early in the morning to go to work and go home with a below minimum wage to his family, think of the employee who wishes he wouldn’t get sick because sick leaves are not an option when price of commodities surge higher than floods, think of the ambulant vendor who will lose a day or two worth of income, think about the germophobe who might faint any moment, those with open wounds, those with broken hearts who are belting that Aegis song in their minds.
2. Your friendly neighborhood politician who aims to run for office come Halalan 2016.
Speaking of floods, don’t you just feel the utter loathing over that road repair project, the open manhole, and the drainage project occupying one to three lanes of the track with the face of your aspiring councilor, congressman, mayor, governor, board member, senator and president all over it?
Every single time you walk on water and you see their Cheshire cat smile, you wish there were funnels as big as the Philippine Arena so that the rains and flood be channeled to their offices or homes along with the living and non-living things, you wish you could just drag all of them to the flood and let it consume them because trapos are good in absorbing water, you wish you could tear down those epal signage and transform it into improvised boats or surfboards or sometimes you wish you could just have the time to vandalize it with a moustache or anything to deface it. Their grandstanding for the upcoming elections have caused us with the unrelenting floods and desire to persecute them for the evident corruption of our taxes for electioneering and saving up for the campaign period towards the homestretch while we perish with the flood and the clingy daily traffic that really has a hard time of letting us go.
3. Noynoy Aquino.
Yes, Noynoy Aquino. Does “Kasalanan ito ng Pangulo!” sound familiar to you? Well, it should be because it’s his fault why intense flooding is happening all over Metro Manila and across the country.
Speaking of corruption, his name surely rings a bell along with Department of Budget Secretary Butch Abad. Pork Barrel King and Disaster President Noynoy Aquino is behind the well-concocted Priority Development Assistance Fund or PDAF and the Disbursement Acceleration Program or DAP that the regime continues to justify because of its help to the people. Among those enlisted in the DAP projects are numerous drainage and road developments which we do not see or even feel. The only tangible thing with this is the flood and the reality that we are screwed over big time, in millions to billions of pesos worth of taxes, that they have syndicated to stuff up those pork bellies and the campaign fund for the Liberal Party, the legion who is challenged to retain its power for the fear of persecution once Aquino is out of the office.
Instead of making a pro-people solution for the floods, Aquino has chosen people over profit through the Public Private Partnership program where large-scale projects are set to go on a rampage of profiteering all over the country, privatizing almost everything except the air. These projects scale throughout Metro Manila and nearby provinces that will benefit the favored people of the Forbes Magazine namely Henry Sy, Lucio Tan, Zobele-Ayala, Consunji and the likes. Practically, these projects won’t even answer the flooding; in fact, it will only worsen it beca use it does not address the basic idea that the urban planning we have now is the same as the crisis of overproduction – an anarchy of erecting project for profit.
Oh and if you’re an environment-loving person, you should know that these men of money are compradors of multinational and transnational corporations who run vast factories and enterprises all over the world that are behind the emission of God-awful amounts of greenhouse gases to the ozone layer causing the global warming that has brought us such an irate Mother Nature. Also, they’re behind the ravaging of natural resources of their own country and third-world countries, like the Philippines, for raw materials for production. The film Avatar could give you an intergalactic version of what I’m saying at this point. They’re the same corporations who made up corporate social responsibility, a feel good excuse for tearing the environment and people to pieces. You know – plant a tree, build a house, and feed the poor and the same sorts.
We still remember Yolanda, Pablo and Habagat. We could go on with a list of names of typhoons and the names of people that died and perished because of Aquino’s inutility. These are disasters that made Aquino the Disaster President that he is, the man-made disaster of prioritizing his KKKK – Kamag-anak, Kaibigan, Kaklase and Kabarilan.
4. PAG-ASA, DOST and our scientists.
Now that we have stated the obvious about corruption, we will now understand why we should not get mad over our government employees at PAG-ASA and the Department of Science and Technology. In fact, our government employees are also victims to government neglect. The employees protested over the low wages or lack of hazard pay despite the unique specialization they have on their profession and the demand of additional hours they need to spend for monitoring and updating atmospheric, geophysical and astronomical activities. This is the reason why the famous Mang Tani left the country. What they do at PAG-ASA and DOST are a handful especially when brain drain hits and we lose the professionals we need in the field of science and technology.
We have so many intellectuals in the country but the sad story continues when they are also forced to go out of the country to seek greener pastures. Even Filipino scientists are on the same page. Remember Agapito Flores and the fluorescent lamp? He could be our version of Thomas Edison but what happened? Lack of government support and national industrialization has pushed our scientists to sell their inventions to greedy private corporations. Do you even remember a Filipino scientist and his or her contribution to the field of science?
Our backward economy has maintained our scientific and technological advancement in a plateau the same way in our education system. Scientific thinking in school has been hampered and discouraged due to the same pattern that has pushed our professionals to go abroad, the labor export policy under neoliberalism.
5. The farmers.
75% of our population are farmers and majority of Filipinos lives in the countryside. While many students are praying for more rain, the toiling farmers are hell-bent on asking that it would not go on intensely for they could lose something more precious than the suspension of classes.
Being a farmer is not easy when feudalism still exists and despotic landlords who embody it are in power. Difficult would be and understatement to the dire situation they have just to produce the rice we have on our tables, the ingredients used to cook the food or essentially every product that we know exists. 7 out of 10 farmers in the country do not have their own land to till, highly ironic for an agricultural country like ours. They are obliged to subject themselves to usury to the landlord to till a portion of their land, make heaps upon heaps of loans from banks and cooperatives to kick-off the planting season, they till the land and plant, spray pesticides and insecticides, guard the farmland starting from the break of dawn, subject his whole family to farm and serve the landlord as its servant in the hacienda. Then come the typhoons. Crops flattened to the ground, loved ones missing from the flood.
Government support after typhoons are worse than the neglect for our scientists. The existence of feudalism is already their life’s biggest disaster and the likes of Aquino that runs a Republika Haciendero is the reason why they have no illusion that under such circumstance can their plight be changed. It will only be changed with a surge of people fighting for genuine change.
6. Storm
I think at this point, asking for Ororo Munroe or Storm from X-Men to pop out from the comics and save the day already crossed your mind. I mean, who wouldn’t ask for that? Having a walking (sometimes flying) and breathing mutant on Earth would be totally awesome until you smack yourself to the reality that it won’t happen.
We’ve indulged ourselves so much with these superheroes that we forget that there is something more powerful than that. A man I know who resides by the name and I consider as the original Man of Steel once said that, “I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.”
He’s right about that. Nothing is more powerful than the power of human will. Cities can be destroyed, empires burned to the ground but the power of human will have outlived all of these.
What can we do with the power of human will? Make the society a better place.
Impossible? Let me quote Dan Brown with his book that taught us that complicated things are actually simple if you pay attention to the essential things, “Nothing is impossible. Impossible just takes a bit longer.”
7. Your crush
Go ahead. Make your moves with your crush and pretend that you don’t have an umbrella and share these things with him or her. Pabebe move? Not quite, well, who cares? Strike up a conversation on why Metro Manila is flooded while making your way home a walk to remember.
After all, isn’t it nice to fulfill what is to be done in the society using the power of human will with the person you like?
