With loving prayers and floral tributes, we honor our dearly departed on All Souls' Day. They shall forever live in our hearts and minds.

Let us also remember the people who perished during the pandemic and natural disasters. The most recent are the casualties of severe tropical storm "Paeng." The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Disaster Management Council, in its 31 October situation report, said the tropical cyclone claimed 101 lives, injured 70 persons, and affected 2 million Filipinos in 69 provinces. Another 66 have been reported missing. Many victims were from Maguindanao del Norte, which experienced flash floods and landslides of such deadly scale for the first time.

Government response

To date, the Marcos government has provided some P36.8 million in aid to the affected population. The social welfare department has pre-positioned relief supplies nationwide, a policy carried over from the previous administration.

Preemptively, the government evacuated around 106,000 people in 11 regions nationwide. Sadly, the devastating storm still displaced more than 863,000 individuals. It is an act of God outside the ambit of human control.

Even sadder is that the 'vultures' are doing it again. I am referring to people, netizens in particular, who unconscionably politicize a national calamity with the view to erode public confidence in our incumbent government. This lowkey display of schadenfreude (or delight in the misfortune of others) from a faction that supposedly embodies democratic ideals is disturbing. They should stop using the sufferings of disaster victims as capital for their destabilization agenda.

It defies logic to expect our sitting president to be immediately present at ground zero. To effectively manage a crisis, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. should operate in a secure command center so that presidential directives clearly cascade to NDRRMC and other government units. Unlike some of PBBM's political contemporaries, he has never been a shameless self-promoter. In the 2016 and 2022 elections, albeit with contrasting results, PBBM never made a public spectacle of himself to gain voters. Since assuming the presidency, he has been on top of every government disaster response, which could only come from his executive experience in local government.