THE TIMES that try men’s souls.
They have come upon us with the tragedy wrought by Supertyphoon Yolanda. Drawing out, primarily, the best in our people as CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s testimony to our indomitable spirit made all the world to witness:
“…amidst the hunger and thirst, the chaos and confusion, we have seen the best in the Filipino people—their strength, their courage… people with every reason to despair, the right to be angry but instead find ways to laugh, to love, to stand up to move forward… they’re bowed perhaps, their bodies tired and traumatized but they are not broken… Maraming salamat for all that you have shown us. Maraming salamat for showing us how to live.”
Bringing out, inversely, the worst in our leaders. President BS Aquino in his antediluvian address assuring the public of government’s preparedness to face Yolanda with: the Air Force’s C-130s fully mission-capable to respond to any contingency, its 32 aircraft on ready stand-by; the Navy’s 20 ships already positioned in Cebu, Bicol, Cavite and Zamboanga; relief goods likewise prepositioned in many of the areas expected to be affected by the supertyphoon.
Not one of BS Aquino’s assurances finding the slightest realization nearly a week into the devastation, death, dislocation and desperation. BS Aquino outsourcing blame for his administration’s monumental failure on the local government units.
BS Aquino snarling – “Bakit, buhay ka pa naman, ah” – at a Leyte businessman who reported being shot at by a looter. BS Aquino, incensed, walking out of his own briefing.
BS Aquino saying the estimated 10,000 fatalities was “too much,” promptly relieving the police officer – no less than the region’s top cop – who announced it. Giving his own estimate of “just” 2,000 to 2,500 dead.
(Just in now, as we write this, BS Aquino conceding the number of fatalities has doubled that of his given ceiling – at 5,209 excluding the 1,755 unidentifi ed bodies recovered in Tacloban City from Nov. 15 to 21.)
BS Aquino on primetime TV: “The delivery of food, water, and medicines to the most heavily affected areas is at the head of our priorities. We have tasked barangays to deliver and distribute these vital needs; 24,000 family food packs were already distributed in Tacloban yesterday; and these efforts are centralized in the eight largest barangays there.”
Anderson Cooper and other international mediamen on cable TV: “Miserable, miserable” state of chaos and despair in Tacloban with no sense of any presence of government there. BS Aquino etcetera, etcetera.
And then there’s Mar Roxas, interior and local government secretary and husband to broadcaster Korina Sanchez. Not necessarily in that order. It was BS Aquino himself that announced – the day before Yolanda struck – that Roxas – along with Defense Sec. Voltaire Gazmin – were “in Leyte to supervise preparations when the storm makes landfall in the province.”
So where was Roxas – and Gazmin too – at the time of the devastation? Nobody bothered to say. Not Roxas. Not Gazmin. Not BS Aquino. Were they, in fact, in Leyte as announced by BS Aquino? Or did they pull out just in time and leave the people to their fate?
First thing we read of Roxas in the immediate aftermath was his asking the Tacloban mayor to cede powers to him. First thing we heard of Roxas was his spirited, albeit subtle, defense of his wife’s malformed opinion of Cooper’s reporting that impacted on the ineptitude of her beloved husband.
Epic fail for Roxas – the looting, aye, the chaos and disorder, of Tacloban that fall squarely and wholly on his lap, being the SILG which carries authority over the national police. And then, there too, is Vice President Jejomar Binay, the very face of epal-itics. What is there more to say about the Dark Vader?
BS Aquino. Roxas. Binay. Tried, tested, and trounced. Yeah, Yolanda wrought the times that try men’s souls. And readily showed some men may be wanting in souls.
