By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:19:00 01/19/2010
The one who’s bound to have absolute sympathy, and empathy for the victims of the Haiti earthquake is Sonia Roco, an LP senatorial candidate. She knows what it means to be pinned underneath the rubble for more than 24 hours, hoping against hope to be rescued but fearing the worst. She knows the experience of living death.
Sonia was one of those who went through the ordeal of being buried alive when the Hotel Nevada in Baguio was struck down by a killer earthquake in July 1990. She was there for an NGO conference sponsored by USAID when the room swayed violently and everything went black. It was sudden, Sonia recalled. One moment they were lining up before a buffet table for merienda bantering about, the next it was pitch dark. She didn’t have time to go for her handbag, which was her reflex action before the lights went out.
I leave Sonia to tell her story in detail. I do hope she does in her sorties. It is a gripping, and inspiring, story of death and resurrection. Suffice it to say here that it was traumatizing, made all the more so by her bilas, Peachie, the wife of Raul Roco’s brother Cho, dying there along with many others. Peachie was hunched over a table and her feet pressed tightly over something. That was how she described it to Sonia soon after the building caved in. She was in great pain, which she bore for 12 hours before giving in. Her last words were: “Son, I can’t take it anymore. My legs are numb. I’m so tired.”
I can only hope Sonia recollects that milestone in her life this July as a senator. She herself says the experience gave her a resolve to give back to the world for the life she got for herself that day, or night, or womb-tomb of time. I believe her. Experiences like that have been known to make people kinder.
But even without experiencing that, your mind must reel from the spectacle of torment left behind by the earthquake that struck Haiti. The buildings torn down like they were made of matchsticks, the mountain of litter and the stench of the dead, the keening and howling and rioting rending the air and earth of that land. As if that country wasn’t already ground down by mind-boggling poverty. That is the face of hell on earth.
Your heart goes out to the people, but your mind also seethes at the recollection of the failed Copenhagen Summit, a meeting gathered to save the planet but which produced nothing of consequence. Certainly nothing that binds the countries, the United States and China, in particular, the two biggest polluters of the earth, to meeting definite targets. The summit of course could have done nothing to prevent the mother of all tremors from flattening Haiti, but it could have prevented more cataclysms of this sort from happening over the next several years. Or lessened the extent of their ferocity.
Does anybody really need any more terrifying proof of a dying planet? Of course more violent earthquakes have shaken the earth in the past. We ourselves have had a couple of them in the last half of the 20th century, the one in 1968, which turned the Ruby Towers into dust, and the one in 1990, which turned a great deal of Baguio into the same state. But at no time have they happened with numbing frequency and severity, alongside other epic disasters, some of them coming completely unexpectedly. It is no small irony that the countries that have resisted efforts at reducing carbon emissions, the United States and China, have themselves been hit by violent cataclysms. Sichuan was hit by an exceptionally murderous earthquake in 2008.
Shortly before the Haiti earthquake, a blizzard blanketed parts of the US east coast in snow and fog, causing a whiteout (visibility zero) in many places. Before that, there was a whole train of natural disasters, from hurricane to superstorms howling across the Pacific to floodwaters inundating, of all places, Jeddah in November last year (worst flooding in a decade, the product of twice the amount of rainfall in a year). Some years in the more distant past have seen more violent cataclysms, but nothing like the cumulative, sustained and accelerating incidences of cataclysms happening today.
The real worry is not that we might suffer the same fate as Haiti, or be hit again by an earthquake the size of 1968 and 1990. The real worry is that we might be hit by other types of disasters we never thought could hit us. Not unlike “Ondoy” which came out of nowhere and wrought the devastation it did. Floods we can alleviate by clearing esteros (creeks) and other waterways. Other forms of disasters there’s precious little we can do about. Short of a global effort to prevent them from taking place in the first place.
That’s the part where you get incensed by the results of the Copenhagen Summit and see the need for continuing protests from the citizens of the planet to compel their leaders to save the planet. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your children.
I don’t know if the Mayan prediction about 2012 being the end of the world will come true. But I do know that if we do not heed the writing in the wind or the stones, it will happen as surely as the setting of the sun. If not in 2012, at least not far from that. It won’t be from an asteroid hitting the earth or a solar flare burning the planet to a crisp. It will be from human folly. It will be from Earth’s most powerful leaders being entombed under the rubble of self-interest and greed, unable to see anything, hear anything, feel anything, and, quite unlike the victims of earthquakes who are pinned underneath, not particularly caring to see the light of day again. For them—or for us, unless we change their minds or them themselves if their minds cannot be changed—the writing on the wall will read:
You have been judged, and found stupid.
