Shakes, scams and families left behind
The common thread linking the drowned athletes, the displaced families in GenSan, the sweltering households, and the victims of manmade floods is a deep, systemic betrayal
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The common thread linking the drowned athletes, the displaced families in GenSan, the sweltering households, and the victims of manmade floods is a deep, systemic betrayal
There is a line from Bob Ong that hits like a physical punch to the gut whenever we look at how we live: “Pilipinas kong mahal, anong nangyari sa ‘tin? Ang daling sabihing mahal mo ang bayan, pero ang hirap panindigan kapag ang mismong bayan ay parang ayaw sa ‘yo.” (My beloved Philippines, what happened to us? It’s so easy to say you love your country, but so hard to stand by it when the country itself feels like it doesn’t want you.)
We have a terrifying, almost numb talent in this country. We can look at a cracking concrete wall, a skyrocketing Meralco bill and a flooded alleyway, and somehow convince ourselves that it’s just another Tuesday.
We treat systemic collapse like the weather — unfortunate, unavoidable and entirely out of our hands. We log onto TikTok and Facebook, leave a sad “react” on a heartbreaking news clip, and seamlessly scroll away to a dance trend. We walk past the ruins of our own lives.
But this past week, the sheer, crushing weight of our reality broke through our collective digital anesthesia. The headlines of our national suffering are no longer just to be consumed; they are the quiet, devastating stories of families watching their world fall apart.
Think about the agonizing loss of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili, the two young Ateneo basketball players who drowned during a team-building trip in Aurora. As an educator who looks into the eyes of ambitious, full-of-life youth every single week, this hits with a sickening pain.
We are not only entrusted with our students’ education but with their safety and overall welfare. There is a duty to care and ensure that they will be safe. We grieve with their families during this difficult time. We pray with them and for them during this most difficult time.
The same rot was torn open down south when a brutal magnitude-7.8 earthquake rocked General Santos City and Sarangani. As the earth split, it didn’t just crack roads; it ripped families from their homes and buried lifetimes of hard, honest work under rubble.
And, predictably, the state machinery immediately began spinning its favorite narrative, praising the “unbreakable thread” of Filipino resilience. Let’s be brutally, gut-wrenchingly honest for once: resilience without resistance is just submission. We force the poor to be strong only because our infrastructure is weak. It is a romanticized scam designed to gaslight grieving, everyday citizens into clapping for their own survival while the people in power line their pockets.
And why is the infrastructure weak? Look no further than the halls of the Senate. While Mindanao shook and displaced, broken families slept in the dirt, our politicians were trapped in a self-serving theater of musical chairs, swapping leadership positions and prioritizing political survival over genuine help. This legislative circus unfolds while the rest of the nation suffocates.
Billions of pesos vanish into flood control corruption networks — ghost projects designed to look good on official paperwork but that leave us literally drowning, losing our homes and losing our loved ones just so a few select political dynasties can live in luxury.
To make matters worse, ordinary families of jeepney drivers, call center agents, sari-sari store owners are opening their electricity bills this month only to find them skyrocketing. We are being forced to pay premium, first-world prices for an unstable grid that leaves us sweating in the dark during rotational blackouts. This is the slow, systematic execution of the Filipino working class.
We are forced to endure the stinging heat of a looming El Niño, watching our meager, hard-earned groceries rot in powerless refrigerators, while corporate energy monopolies and toothless regulators point fingers at everything but their own greed. It is a quiet, exhausting baseline of loss — the loss of dignity, the loss of comfort, the loss of a future.
The common thread linking the drowned athletes, the displaced families in GenSan, the sweltering households and the victims of manmade floods is a deep, systemic betrayal. The state demands total compliance from us — pay your taxes on time, pay your exorbitant bills, endure the heat and the grief without complaining — but offers nothing but hollow, automated promises in return.
Every side has a gut-wrenching lesson to learn here. To the authorities and corporate boardroom barons: stop treating the Filipino people like a bottomless well of endurance. Your negligence is not an administrative error; it is a body count. You are breaking families every single day.
To my fellow citizens, especially the youth who hold the future: stop being fans of political dynasties. Stop looking for heroes in the very people who engineered our poverty. When we treat politicians like gods, we should not be surprised when they treat us as sacrifices.
Bob Ong warned us that the biggest enemy of the Filipino is our own willingness to settle for an environment that treats us like dirt. The messiah is a myth. No single leader is coming to save us from the next earthquake, the next power hike, or the next flood.
It is time to stop looking to the grand stage for a savior and start looking in the mirror for a citizen. Wake up, stand up, and look out for each other — or prepare to lose everything to the very systems we refuse to change.
