Anti-resilience

Each of us should now vehemently renounce the proverbial axiom that the Filipino is resilient, especially after the monstrous devastating “habagat” floods of the past few days.

No more excuses. Enough is enough.

In fact, we should be insulted, as one Filipino novelist put it, every time someone raises the resilience banner in these trying times.

Insulting, because resilience is a stand-in for the other mystifying dictate that bourgeois types often proclaim and insist once things go wrong: “To obey, to go on obeying, and to be obedient till the end of time.”

“To be resilient, to go on being resilient, and to be resilient till the end of time” then is no more than dictating obedience: to obey and not question the obvious systemic failures in combating floods and other natural disasters.

But these systemic failures, once seen clearly, are actually boons not only to our vilified political class but also to the rapacious, and all too often shadowy, segments of our native national bourgeoisie.

And all because these systemic failures serve well the enormous power of the bourgeois caste.

Thus, we should go beyond our typical greedy political class — convenient scapegoats — once people suffer from preventable natural calamities and disasters, since the greedy politician, too, is a major segment of our bourgeois caste.

We therefore must harshly condemn and indict other powerful members of our national bourgeoisie who directly or indirectly contribute to man-made natural disasters for what he or she did or did not do.

So, on the judging dock too is the mall or real estate taipan, the mining tycoon, the civil works tycoon, the banking magnate, the plastics king, the food manufacturing tycoon, the technocrat-bureaucrat, the Filipino multinational executive, the well-heeled corporate lawyer, and still many others.

And what is the primary charge to be laid against them? They didn’t care so long as profits were to be made.

They didn’t care if they constructed malls, condos, subdivisions, and spanking avenues over vital waterways; they didn’t care if denuding the Sierra Madre with mines and quarries endangered communities; they didn’t care if the plastics they keep on making ended up clogging the drains.

Who knows what else may be found in the shadows. But in the wake of any natural calamity, they forthwith hypocritically condemn, through their urbane mouthpieces, the failures of what they claim is an easily corrupted government and society.

But they are no innocents. As in the proverbial “it takes two to tango,” these morally bankrupt segments of the bourgeois caste are as well-versed in the wiles of corruption and kickbacks as their political counterparts when the enormous profits in their pockets are at stake.

Thus, these post-colonial slices of our bourgeois caste, comfortable in their air-conditioned offices and residences high up in the sky looking smugly down on the flooded streets, equally stand condemned.

Of course, the rapacious politician and the bureaucrat, who in a recent report now demand a 60-percent kickback from government projects, must take the lion’s share of the blame.

These rapacious politicians and bureaucrats are similarly nonchalant in giving out well-wrought reasons on the causes and effects of the flooding in the aftermath of the floods.

They excuse themselves without taking responsibility, much less are their apologies forthcoming. Not only are they gaslighting us for not standing our ground against political and economic interests but also for looking the other way when they know full well that what they approved risks the safety and welfare of most Filipinos.