The famed resiliency of the Filipino people has been put on the spotlight once more by the recent floods in various parts of the nation, as the combination of the Habagat, or southwest monsoon, and various tropical storms have wrought torrential rains in different areas, from Negros all the way to Luzon.
It still happens almost every year, and isn’t even a surprise anymore, and despite all the ‘learned lessons’ and promises, or spending billions of pesos for infrastructure, our government just can’t seem to solve the problem, so they end up praising our resiliency to assuage our suffering as they make more empty promises that it will never happen again.
The famously resilient Filipino doesn’t get fazed by floods. After the initial shock, we just power through, recover, and then get on with our lives. The younger and more carefree ones can even enjoy the misery by taking the opportunity to engage in DIY watersports on what were city streets and alleyways. The entrepreneurial ones make a killing by offering transportation services to those who are trying not to get too wet as they make their way from point A to B.
After enduring years of flooding, and then bearing with the inconvenience of the many flood control related projects, which meant that roads that had just been closed for unnecessary repairs were going to have to be broken and dug up all over again, sometimes for months, with the promise that it would all be worth it in the end, the resilient Filipino is starting to get tired because after we tolerated all that, the problem still won’t go away.
Whether it is due to poor design and execution, absent maintenance, or maybe even climate change, it seems like the resilient Filipino is no longer accepting any more excuses from their own government that not only takes a massive cut from our income, but even charges us with VAT every time we buy something, and we seem to get nothing back in return, aside from corruption and political dynasties.
Politicians and our supposed public servants should realize that it is already 2025, which means it has been so long that most of them have either ROI’d or already established their own political dynasties, so the use of resiliency as a crutch is becoming pretty old by now. Yes, that’s not being very resilient of us, but everyone has a breaking point and it looks like this could be it for our resiliency.
If we are approaching the era of the end of Filipino resiliency, then our politicos and leaders could be in for some trouble because the opposite of resiliency is fed up. Urban dwellers are getting fed up with the floods and traffic and all the lame excuses for why those problems aren’t going away. Here in the province, even the Kanlaon evacuees are getting fed up, after being stuck in evacuation centers for months without any idea what the government is planning for them, other than being told that they still can’t go home yet.
If their solution is to build more infrastructure yet again, how can we be sure that they know what they are doing? If better maintenance is necessary, how do we know they can and will sustain the effort, especially after the sun comes out for a few days and everyone forgets just how high the floodwaters rose due to apathy and ignorance?
If you come to think of it, it is entirely possible that all this isn’t even totally their fault, because there is also climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels that is making everything worse. Even cities in first world countries are experiencing floods now, which could make a case for the inability of our own public officials to prevent such disasters.
However, just because they have a convenient excuse, it doesn’t mean that they can now continue to fail us as they have. They just have to bear in mind that they now have to deal with a bigger problem than before, which means they will need bigger brains to come up with better and more sustainable answers, along with more brawn to make sure those solutions are built quickly and efficiently, hopefully with zero or minimal corruption for big ticket items.
Whether the solution is to fix or reconfigure drainage systems, start all over again to build new ones, or come to terms that we may have to relocate entire low lying communities entirely, it has to be comprehensive, taking into consideration all the factors based on our extensive experience with disasters, and sustainable, so government doesn’t have to rely on its people to have no choice but to do the adjusting and be the resilient ones because we live in cities that just aren’t.*
