Tuesday, October 09, 2007 Obenieta: Puddle of water, pool of blood By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
NOT ours to see, so concedes a song about the future. But because leaders need to be inspirational, their instinct for political survival compels them to indulge in cheery-goody clairvoyance.
And so, when the present looms prone to a plague, the end will always be rendered colorful and radiant through the cliché of official assurance: There will be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or there will be light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no place like ho-hum.
Talk about Cebu as a megacity, and it would be a breeze for its bigwigs to play up its fortune-telling forte. And always there will be suckers out to swallow the extravagance of infrastructures and skyscrapers as fact and proof of progress.
Reality check comes, however, with a reminder from Bill Watterson, cartoonist-author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. “Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present,” he warns. “Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.”
The way blood-suckers buzz around our ears, a wake-up call for City Hall came shrill with this sobering news: “Cebu City now under state of calamity.”
Carcass-feeding vultures are redundant, really, for as long as the city—all 80 of its barangays—is swarming with mosquitoes. As reported, the City Health Department has recorded its 1,000th dengue case with 25 deaths.
What’s faster than death on the wings of a mosquito bite? What else, indeed, other than the belated scratching in the head. And, yes, the scraping at the bottom of priorities after an apparent failure to tap not just financial resources but also the rigor of imagination to animate the community into pro-active awareness and mobilization for a dengue-proof neighborhood.
Against the façade-perfect edifices, there’s no denying the city’s superficiality in the shadow hulking over the horror of its drainage system and its spawn: stagnant water in the wake of flood-rising rain.
Now it can be told. Stagnancy also pertains to the City’s state of preparedness, not just the puddles breeding deadly insects.
In spite of its weakness for tooting its horn, the sound of one hand smacking at a mosquito also jolts the city with another skin-crawling phenomenon staining the city’s image with blood.
Still reeling from the infestation of the infamous “vigilante-style” serial murderers, the city’s vulnerability has been sapped dry with the recent spate of random deaths from “shooting sprees” attributed to gang members.
“Boom” once sounded upbeat about Cebu’s economy, but now it rhymes well with doom with the constancy of bywords like “alarming increase in the number of cases” and “outbreak.”
In a city swamped with disease and lawlessness, the young victims might as well filch for their common epitaph this wry bit of witticism: “The best blood will sometimes get into a fool or a mosquito.”
Yes, heaven can wait as long as the future flutters on the wings of death.
