By JULLIE YAP DAZA
THEY call me Ms. Ery and they will do everything to avoid me, but the more they try the more hysterical I get. LOL! To inflict suffering, inconvenience, troubles and problems on a large scale, to see massive numbers trapped in the most inspiring ways as often as I can make it happen, that is my pride and joy. I thrive on the aches and pains of my victims, they are everywhere, wet, waiting, stranded. The thing is, though they are used to it, they could never be.
They struggle on the streets that have turned into dirty rivers (you’ve seen any clean rivers lately?). Media focus their cameras on flooded roads and highways, bridges and railroad tracks – what a gleeful picture – forgetting the wondrous woes unfolding inside the tiny houses in low-lying neighborhoods, the evacuation centers where, packed like sardines, they eat canned sardines. Marvelous, once the distance between one cheerful flood and the next gets any shorter, PAGASA will be forced to add a third season and name it after me.
It’s not enough that precipitation and inundation arrive on a grand scale, there’s also the likelihood of dams overflowing – Congratulations, folks! Rainfall from the sky, a waterfall from the reservoir. Double whammy for you, double delight for Ms. Ery!
You people blame nature and call it natural disasters, but rain is natural while floods are manmade mistakes, the more’s the merrier. How amusing to watch people gleefully throwing trash into their creeks for other people to pick up – will wonders never cease? As for the thousands waterlogged on España, wasn’t it only last year that the street was rebuilt to banish floods forever? And if the pump station doesn’t pump because garbage perenially clogs the engines, is it the rain’s fault?
Happiness is watching DepEd and DILG fighting over whose call it is to suspend classes before a storm strikes. How I’d love to see the weather bureau in a three-cornered fight. Parents, come on, pick up the gauntlet and turn this into a free-for-all. You decide: Let your kid get wet and get sick, or stay home, stay dry, and make me miserable.