When it starts to rain inside the bus, times are really tough.
Cold on the trail of Cebuano newspapers published during the American colonial era, I dive these days into the longest, dirtiest river snaking through Metro Manila: Edsa.
The Epifanio delos Santos Ave. (Edsa) is a major thoroughfare that has been compared during traffic gridlocks, by sharp-eyed netizens, to a world titlist’s shimmering sinuous scarlet gown when the highway is turgid with the red taillights of vehicles paralyzed by the curse of neverending rush hour.
When the monsoon gods unleash the sky’s torrents, Edsa transforms into an urban river, awash in flash floods, dead cats and detritus floating straight out of the most putrescent phantasm conjured in Third World porn.
I can only wish then I were a crocodile, river denizen of power who can inure itself by merely closing those primeval lids and reducing the horrors of the present into the toothless myths of the past.
In reality, I am only one of Edsa’s minions, a public commuter whose magic extends only to the unfurling of an umbrella while riding a bus whose ceiling started to drip steadily in one of the recent downpours. My companion covered her head with a fuchsia shawl while my umbrella, already drenched from use, trickled more tears of dust, rust and the unthinkable on our heads.
Yet, I cannot complain. When technocrats announce the orange alert for dangerous levels of rainfall—Stay home! Stay safe! —that is when the streets are at their cleanest. Rains flush clear streets and sidewalks of most of the peddlers, vendors and beggars that require extraordinary measures like an Isko Moreno for “street clearing.”
The current darling of the press, Moreno’s claim to political will was sealed by blitzkrieg operations moving out the hardiest vendors occupying Divisoria, Recto Ave. and other enclaves notorious for sidewalk and street “squatters.”
The rains, pitiless as politicians rushing to hurl ordinance, bandwagon and all at encroaching members of the informal economy, lacks a political agenda to reach for higher political offices by interpreting public service with social blinders, stopping short of offering relocation and sustainable space-sharing alternatives to vendors, as much part of the public as the bourgeoisie and businessmen claiming right of way for their cars and delivery trucks.
If politicians swam regularly in asphalt rivers with the folks peddling boiled peanuts, corn and bananas, foot socks, umbrellas, phone SIM cards and “sari-sari,” they will not mistake the call that unites us all: to survive.