20/20 hindsight

Though our country is one never wanting for action, the last couple of weeks have been particularly gripping and traumatic to the national psyche.

The non-typhoon that killed and destroyed on a massive scale, the tragic crash of a Piper Seneca, and the very public attack on an MMDA enforcer—anyone who regularly follows the news should concede this is all compelling, depressing stuff.

What renders these events more tragic is the fact that they all could have been prevented.

But that’s the nature of hindsight. It’s an infallible genius that smacks you on the forehead and calls you stupid—probably exactly what MMDA mauler Robert Clair Carabuena’s peers and bosses told him.

All this brouhaha over a traffic incident? Well, tell that to Rolito Go, the most infamous road rage monster of them all who, incidentally, again made headlines recently for dubious reasons. Road rage is a bitch. Cavort with it at your peril.

Hindsight can be more painful on a national scale that it paralyzes us with such regret. Nagueños aren’t the only ones mourning the loss of Sec. Jesse Robredo, and we can’t fault people for picking and prying at every detail to see how the accident could have been prevented. Should he have taken that Cebu Pacific flight? Should he have insisted on another private plane—not the Piper Seneca which carries a spotty safety record in general?

Some lessons should be more obvious, but nature needs to keep reminding us anyway because we never seem to learn. Consider the tons and tons of garbage that was shoved in our societal throat via Roxas Boulevard. You may throw your rubbish in the water and forget about it, but the water remembers. Now, we know that it merely bides its time and waits for us to do the right thing—if ever. That deluge of water and filth ought to be the last wakeup call that Ondoy apparently wasn’t.

In a political science class in college, we were taught that people will not care about the environment if they don’t have anything to eat. It makes perfectly good sense. Indeed, the abject poverty that is as severe as the wealth gap between our haves and have-nots is the smoking gun to a number of crimes.

Sadly, insufficiency and the problems it spawns (such as homelessness) are a complex, tangled mess which cannot be undone simply by throwing money into it. Habitat for Humanity Philippines (HFHP) managing director and CEO Charlie Ayco, in a recent press conference attended by this writer, pointed out that the mire we find ourselves in has been caused by “rapid urbanization,” plus climate change. “It’s a complex situation,” he lamented, one exacerbated by the fact that a whopping 65 percent of the population live in urban areas.

“There’s no one agency or person that can totally solve this problem,” Ayco insisted. Standing up for this issue, ironically, means sitting down with all stakeholders and arrive at an acceptable solution.

HFHP suggests onsite or in-city relocation. “If you move them so far away from where they are, they would never agree to that. They have their social connections, livelihood. They have their friends there,” Ayco continued.

Of course, you shouldn’t let people clog up waterways and live in precarious locations. Since the key problem is land, you make the most of what little that is available. “You go up vertically—a medium rise,” he said. You also appeal to the landed to donate (or even sell at a fair price) pieces of property that can go towards relocating informal settlers for good.

As I said, one tangled mess.

Tony Gilroy, Bourne Legacy director, famously explained his choice of Manila as a location. “It’s just so colorful, and ugly, and gritty and raw and stinky and crowded,” he described. A ubiquitous local talking head took offense with the comments (which I think were fair and done without malice), and made it a soapbox for his “nationalistic” bombast.

Why do we fault other people for calling it what it is? Said talk show host might wake in up in a beautiful bed in a beautiful piece of property and hobnob with the beautiful celebrities, but a lot of us do not.

So, we do what we can and we do what we should to rectify the situation. Acceptance is half the battle; just ask any recovering addict.

Boy, I can’t wait for his hindsight.