‘The Great C-5 Traffic Jam of 2014’ and Twitter’s gridlock of empathy

MANILA, Philippines - You know a public event is monumental when you can remember where you were when it happened. People still remember where they were and what they were doing when Mount Pinatubo erupted and rained down ashes from the heavens, or when the great earthquake of 1990 shook Luzon, or when the Twin Towers collapsed in 2001.

Something tells me we’re going to remember where we were during the Great C5 Traffic Jam of 2014 for a long time — not necessarily because it was one of the worst traffic jams in a history cluttered with horrible traffic jams — but because we were literally stuck there. For hours. Countless hours. Soul-crushing, life-paralyzing hours that we’ll never ever get back for the rest of our lives.

We were trapped, but at least we could tweet about it. Hundreds of thousands of people stuck in motionless vehicles were now armed with smart phones and mobile data accounts, when in the olden days of half a decade ago they were left to scream in the void of their solitarily-confined consciousness, diluted into meek “tsk, tsk”s when finally let out into the world. This time, we did not sit quietly as the minutes piled up into hours. We roared as loud as 140 characters or less can.

What started out as a truck accident at the C5 road soon spread out into a full-blown inter-city gridlock that stretched back as far as the North Avenue station of the MRT on EDSA. The state of Metro Manila’s traffic is so precarious, all it takes to cripple the whole system is for one domino to fall. As if on cue, The New York Times published an article entitled “Strained Infrastructure in Philippines Erodes the Nation’s Growth Prospects,” providing us the detailed mechanics of the very torture we just endured.

Hyperbole

Obviously, there are far worse things out there deserving of the word “torture.” It’s easy to resort to hyperbole when describing something banal, as long as it elicits extreme emotion. The words “hellish” and “carmageddon” were used online, conjuring images from the Book of Revelations. That’s what extreme traffic does — it isolates your consciousness to the point where everything else in the periphery loses importance. You’re going to be late for that meeting. Your car has to make that turn, other vehicles be damned. Everywhere on Twitter and on news sites, the traffic was the big story. A nameless “one dead” was often mentioned, but mostly in passing, with all the ceremony of a pen filling out a tally sheet.

That “one dead” was a 24-year-old named Richard Parado, also called “Eboy.” Very little is known about him beyond the fact that he was aboard another truck that got smashed in the accident. He was a casualty, an unfortunate statistic that may also be seen as a fortunate one — there could’ve easily been more. Such is the degree of detachment required in consuming the news, especially through the solipsistic brevity of social media. We only have enough emotional bandwidth for our own bad day in traffic.

Twitter will always be predominantly about the living and the tiny, mundane minutiae of everyday life. Occasionally, it will also be about the dead, but only the prominent ones who have reached a level of excellence and fame as to render them, somehow, completely relatable. Lone deaths of ordinary people like Richard Parado just do not resonate. What gets talked about instead is the trivial concerns of the living, made extreme enough to matter, but ordinary enough to be spared from negligible tragedy.

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