Mercado: Rubbing patience raw

Saturday, February 11, 2012

HOW long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” Cicero erupted in 63 BC at the Roman Senate against a tyrant plotting subversion.

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” fits exchanges between Rep. Tomas Osmeña and Mayor Mike Rama on the panic, triggered by false warnings of a tsunami, after Monday’s 6.9 magnitude earthquake.

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Fright spread after radio blocktimer Danilo Cogtas reportedly barreled through town yelling: Tsunami is about to swamp downtown areas! That claim ricocheted through cell phones and the Internet.

In a Barangay Luz cemetery, a family abandoned the coffin to flee. Vendors jettisoned their goods. “At the Cebu City Medical Center, patients dragged their dextrose stands and scampered in different directions,” Sun.Star reported. Prisoners screamed to wardens: “Let us out.”

“Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a phrase from the 1919 decision by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The concept underscores speech which is false, serves no useful purpose and is “extremely and imminently dangerous.”

Day after, Philippine Institute of Seismology and Volcanology apologized for issuing a Tsunami Alert 2 without explanation. That alert merely asked local governments to monitor seawater conditions, right after the quake. But many mistook it for an approaching tsunami.

“We apologize to the public for any panic that the warning caused,” Phivolcs Lapu-Lapu City officer in charge Robinson Jorgio said. “If only we were given a chance to explain why we issued the warning.”

“If only…must be the two saddest words in the world,” a poet says. The psychological stress by the false alarm has been severe. So was the economic damage.

This is not the first earthquake. It won’t be the last. We must take steps to prevent a repeat. Surely, everybody can cooperate on crafting ways to handle similar crises. The speed of cyberspace communication gives special urgency for pulling together.

Cebu must re-invent itself, as weather events become more extreme, cautions Bank of the Philippine Islands Foundation and World Wild Life in a study that peers 30 years into the future. A new international study on urban competitiveness ranked Cebu as 475 out of 500 cities.”

Rama regretted the Council shredded his proposal to create a command center to address such emergencies. “Osmeña does not have anything positive to say.” “The major problem of Rama’s administration is mismanagement,” snapped Osmeña “I was the first to set up a command center after Typhoon Ruping hit in 1990,” etc.

“To what end will your unbridled audacity hurl itself?” Cicero asked. Quo usque quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?

Civic groups, meanwhile, forge new patterns of cooperation in a metropolis taking shape from Carcar in the south to Danao in the north, despite myopic officials.
Businessmen and civil society leaders from 21 cities and towns formed the Metro Cebu Development Coordinating Board “to open doors to tomorrow.”

The Ramon Aboitiz foundation convened a forward-looking conference on “Creating Future Cities: People and Place Making.” Scientists, local officials and administrators discussed “urban sprawl repair and smart growth,” the “new urbanism” to “infrastructure planning.”

Can Rep. Osmeña, meanwhile, stash his broken Rama-Is-A-Bum record? Play something else for a change. How about “I was a Xavier University summa-cum-laude graduate”? No? Try “the sun will not rise if I am not mayor.”

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?