Flood victims’ revolt

“They (the corrupt officials and contractors) shouldn’t be accountable to me; they should be accountable to the people here for the hardships they have brought into their lives,” Mr. Marcos Jr. remarked last week after inspecting a botched flood control project in Bulacan.

Typical of his recent soundbites, this time Mr. Marcos Jr.’s remarks can’t be cynically dismissed as another lame attempt at populist politicking.

In fact, scrutinizing his admission about the victims of power and corruption makes us keenly aware that we’re now facing what we’ll dramatically call a brewing revolt of the flood victims.

At first take, Mr. Marcos Jr.’s statement — “they shouldn’t be accountable to me” --- shows the incontrovertible fact that only no-nonsense presidential power can rein in the corrupt.

He, however, quickly acknowledges that his vast powers pale before the brooding, unstoppable force the victims of the corrupt can unleash when pushed to the limit.

Faced with that stark reality, Mr. Marcos Jr. couldn’t bring himself to talk so glibly about the flood victims, probably realizing during his walk-around that scores of anonymous victims had never been treated as individuals before.

On the sunny afternoon of his visit, three weeks after the devastating “habagat” floods, the Chief Executive saw streets, houses still flooded and the gathered, rubber-booted residents standing or squatting in stagnant water and mud.

Mr. Marcos Jr. was forced to call the place a swamp. It’s good he was able to see the squalor and suffering. For sure, no high-ranking politician or bureaucrat had ever bothered to ask questions or spend time with the residents of the community the President visited.

On a more ominous note, Mr. Marcos Jr. undoubtedly sensed the residents of that obscure Bulacan community — which stood for the other still-flooded communities surviving in the shadow of supposedly life-normalizing flood control projects — were at the end of their tether.

Under the respectful smiles and greetings there was an unmistakable fragile collective despair that threatens to explode if nothing drastic is done.

So, Mr. Marcos Jr.’s rhetoric also informs of a worried leader desperately trying to make his own people and allies see the explosive social volcano, urging them to move quickly before things get out of hand.

But will the President’s men and political allies heed his declared war against the powerful criminal underbelly, past and present, abusing the government’s billion-peso, easily manipulated flood control and other infrastructure projects?

Considering that some of the President’s men and allies are themselves probably members or beneficiaries of that same criminal underbelly, a definitive answer may be long in coming.

But his people and allies better understand that the prevailing public mood is ugly.

So ugly, in fact, even the public’s very own equally guilty collective apathy towards corruptive and corrupt social morals isn’t spared.

“Then when the billions siphoned off finally hit the headlines, we act scandalized, like innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. The real scandal isn’t just the money lost. It’s our national talent for playing dumb…because deep down, we all know corruption isn’t the exception in government. It’s the business model,” as a good friend of mine strikingly put it.

Indeed, in the many ways we’ve “normalized” corruption, we have failed to see that the corrupt criminal underbelly has shaped us, that no matter how much we pompously decry it, the criminal underbelly has swallowed us up. We’ve become part of it.