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    Yolanda & Us

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    Zara Dy
    The document discusses the Philippine government's response to Typhoon Yolanda and the failures that have been exposed. It argues that the government has failed the Filipino people by not adequately responding to the immediate needs of survivors after over a week. It claims the government is a reflection of its people, and that Filipinos have contributed to the dysfunction by not holding the government accountable over the years. It questions whether Filipinos will continue reacting only after disasters or work to prevent man-made problems in the future through sustained civic engagement.

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    Yolanda & Us

    Uploaded by

    Zara Dy
    22 views3 pages
    The document discusses the Philippine government's response to Typhoon Yolanda and the failures that have been exposed. It argues that the government has failed the Filipino people by not adequately responding to the immediate needs of survivors after over a week. It claims the government is a reflection of its people, and that Filipinos have contributed to the dysfunction by not holding the government accountable over the years. It questions whether Filipinos will continue reacting only after disasters or work to prevent man-made problems in the future through sustained civic engagement.

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    Insights on Philippine Governance in Light of Yolanda and the Leyte Debacle

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    The document discusses the Philippine government's response to Typhoon Yolanda and the failures that have been exposed. It argues that the government has failed the Filipino people by not adequately responding to the immediate needs of survivors after over a week. It claims the government is a reflection of its people, and that Filipinos have contributed to the dysfunction by not holding the government accountable over the years. It questions whether Filipinos will continue reacting only after disasters or work to prevent man-made problems in the future through sustained civic engagement.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    22 views3 pages

    Yolanda & Us

    Uploaded by

    Zara Dy
    The document discusses the Philippine government's response to Typhoon Yolanda and the failures that have been exposed. It argues that the government has failed the Filipino people by not adequately responding to the immediate needs of survivors after over a week. It claims the government is a reflection of its people, and that Filipinos have contributed to the dysfunction by not holding the government accountable over the years. It questions whether Filipinos will continue reacting only after disasters or work to prevent man-made problems in the future through sustained civic engagement.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    of 3

    WE ARE PART OF GOVERNMENT It's heartbreaking. But should we really be surprised?

    Just like everyone else, I've been up to my eyeballs in news about Yolanda and efforts to help the victims. It's frustrating understatement! how it seems that everyone else in the world but the "hilippine government is more organi#ed in their efforts to help. $e see the pleas of the victims% how assistance has not reached them, how whatever is being done is not enough. It's true. It's been & days and not much of the situation has improved. 'ome reports from the government say they plan to have everything in control by 'aturday. (hat's ) days of no water, shelter, food, and ) days of having to survive amongst rotting corpses. (he strength of the typhoon, the material destruction it would leave behind, these are the things nobody could do anything about. *ot even developed countries could have done anything to cushion the impact. It was, after all, the worst storm recorded in recent history. +conomic cost, however, is different from human cost in the form of lives lost. $here was the mayor of (acloban found? ,p on a roof at a seaside resort. $asn't he warned about the typhoon of e-traordinary proportions coming by his city? .e hasn't claimed he wasn't warned, so I take it he was. 'ome say, /nobody could have prepared for it./ (hat's not true. *obody could have prevented it from coming, nobody could have stopped it from ravaging whatever was on its path, but surely people could move away from areas that would make them more vulnerable to it. 'ome people prepared for its coming by doing 0ust that 1 moving away. 'ome survivors talk about their dead and recount that they were separated because they, the survivors, sought higher ground or scrambled for sturdier shelter. (here were survivors. $hat did they do differently? 2ear readers, if the mayor of the city did not seem to take the warning as gravely as he should have, why would the rest of his constituents? $hat we see unfolding in the news, the reality highlighted by the international community's commentaries, and the desperate cries we hear from our fellow 3ilipinos who are now dying, even after they have survived the fury of the storm, is only but a gruesome manifestation of the corrupted system and mentality we've lived with all these years. $e hate it, but we can't decide to hold anyone accountable for it. +-cept maybe the president. "oor guy, really 1 'endong in 4566, earth7uake in *egros and Bopha in 4564, 8amboanga last 'eptember, earth7uake in Bohol and 9ebu last :ctober, and now Yolanda.! (he 3ilipino race is so self1reliant that we loathe the /system/, but the minute it gets personal we take things into our own hands and find a way to rise above or sink below!, never really confronting it. ;ising above is a good thing, not confronting it is not. (hese aren't mutually e-clusive acts. $e can do both, however, we have been known to be 7uite a non1confrontational people to the real actors we should be confronting!.

    9riticism at this time does nothing to help, true, but there's a lesson to be learned here that we cannot learn if we refuse to be critical. $hy is this happening to the survivors? Because our whole lives we have been 3ilipino survivors, in one way or another, and we have never held the government responsible. (hey have taken our apathy as permission to be dysfunctional. (hey have taken our passive1aggressive attitude as a sign of surrender to their convoluted norms. (hey have taken our own lack of personal integrity and accountability in public affairs as cue to continue on their /accepted/ paths. (hey have taken our understanding of their shortcoming as absolution. (hese are the little things that, in times of unavoidable reckoning such as this, manifest so obviously that can we really be surprised if the government we have accused of failing the 3ilipino race all these years has failed us once again? $hen government money enriches the select few instead of reaching and improving the lives of the impoverished many, the government has failed us. $hen government is corrupted by the self1serving, la#y or incompetent, the government has failed us. $hen government has failed to ade7uately respond to the immediate needs of our brothers and sisters & days after a catastrophe of this magnitude, the government has failed us. (he government is not 0ust one person, it is the organi#ational unit of our state. <s organi#ations go, it is only as strong as its weakest member. $hat we fail to see is that we, the 3ilipino people, are part of government. (he people who are in it now, these public servants, are our representatives. 'o is it not, then, that the government is but a reflection of the prevailing ma0ority of 3ilipinos? It might be time to admit that, actively or passively, we have directly contributed to the stock who represent and serve us. Bayanihan is very much alive right now. :ne wonders what kind of change is possible if we all decide that the 3ilipino spirit that moves us to be so selfless and involved at this time of need be the spirit we carry with us until our last breath. $e are a country of over =,555 islands, the ne-t area hit could be ours. $hat is happening to our brothers and sisters could very well happen to us. <re we going to continue reacting only after the fact, or are we going to live the rest of our lives making sure that the only disasters we will ever have to contend with are natural and not man1made? $ords are useless to those who cannot understand them. $hat makes a difference is action. $hat we do and how we act will mean the same thing across all levels of il!literacy. 2o we need tragedies to bring out the best in us or can we sustain our nationalism through everyday acts of integrity and unity long after the storm has passed?

    8ara >arie 2y 6? *ovember 456@

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