What a mess

Wake me up when September comes. August is turning out to be messier than we imagined. We were told the realms of heaven and hell would open on the 15th day of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar and ghosts will come out. But the spirits of the deceased, it seems, have nothing to do with the bedlam. 

Most of the mess is man-made. Two weekends ago, nearly half of Manila was submerged in garbage-filled water. Last weekend, our pathetic gateway was paralyzed, no thanks to a lone Chinese carrier that veered off the runway.

The spirits are out and about, indeed but I am sure they have nothing to do with the mayhem.  

So how, I wonder, did we end up this way?

The scene at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport filled to the brim with stranded passengers was as surreal as it can get. From afar and with a squint, the throng of people looked like a sea of garbage on Manila’s streets after the downpour. The images are different, but very similar – and both are concrete signs of system failure in this country. 

Over the weekend, the horror stories just kept on coming.  A friend’s son, stranded in Taipei on an Eva Air flight, called his parents to say they finally landed after a day’s delay, but at Clark and not at NAIA. Five hours later, he would call again to say they are still on board the aircraft.  

“And it gets better,” my friend said, “The pilot just announced they would be going back to Taipei.” 

A business tycoon was stuck at the airport for at least seven hours. A family found their trip to Singapore canceled. They ended up watching a concert by Manila’s self-confessed tone deaf darling performer. 

Filipinos indeed are resilient. And we can laugh during the most difficult of times. It’s also the same resilience and humor that politicians have abused and used again and again to fool us with promises.

 But really, we deserve much better than what we’re getting. We deserve better services because we are taxed left and right – beer, cigarettes, food, sugar, the roads that we use – you name it.

 And yes, we deserve a new airport. NAIA, which has an annual capacity of 30 million passengers, handled 42 million passengers last year. 

The recent airport chaos is a scary sign of the times. Have we reached a point where we can no longer move about freely, when people can no longer get in and out of Manila? We don’t have an excuse. This isn’t even a war-torn country. I thought not being allowed to drive on EDSA when I need to just because I’m part of the singles group was already so bad. 

Now a lone aircraft that veered off the runway has led to the disruption of more than 200 flights and brought trouble to tens of thousands of passengers. We were held hostage by one plane, stuck on one runway, in one airport.  

If this isn’t system failure, I don’t know what to call it.

 Now more than ever, we really need to jumpstart the new airport projects. We needed a new airport yesterday. Now, we’re lagging way behind other countries. Ramon “RSA” Ang said his proposed Bulacan Airport could have four runways. The guys behind the proposed Sangley Airport said the same thing.  

From the two local airlines alone, at least 39,000 passengers were affected. Every stranded passenger – man, woman, child – as a result of the disaster at NAIA must be enough reasons for the Duterte administration to immediately act on the airport proposals.  

What happens next is still anybody’s guess. We can cry and curse and rant on our timelines but that, too, is turning out to be futile.  

Who can we turn to? Let’s go running to the adults in the Cabinet, but can we even tell who they are? We can try to catch the aide-turned-senatoriable-wannabee when he’s listening to live music in a watering hole in Greenhills at one in the morning or we can go out in the streets and burn the President’s effigy. But will these work? 

We are running out of options to get this government to really, really hear us out. But we can’t stop. We need to keep on pressing the men in the white palace over and over until things get better. 

Sometimes, admittedly, we just want to forget about what’s happening around us and escape from it all. We drown ourselves in endless servings of Wagyu. We climb walls to forget about lost lovers and the unraveling economy. Or we make memories in a parallel universe in a charming speakeasy.

 Maybe we can take some melatonin. But then again, escape, as I’ve said before is only a palliative. It’s never really a cure. We will still wake up to the same reality. What we really need is to keep pushing the government to change this reality.

In the meantime, it’s not a sin to long for better days. Oh, September I can’t wait. While Green Day wanted it to end, I can’t wait for it to come. And hopefully, hopefully, things will be better.  

Iris Gonzales’ e-mail address is [email protected]