General Admissions
‘Bangungot Pestebal’
By Al S. Mendoza
WHAT FESTIVAL are we talking about here? Are we all blind? Bangus Festival? What’s that?
Open your eyes.
Look around you.
Sniff the air.
What do you see? What do you picture? What do you smell?
You see a government that values parades which are nothing but charades.
You gaze at a painter’s canvas reeking of grime and stench signifying a dying city.
You inhale a stinking, foul-ridden whiff only a habitat on its death throes is capable of emitting.
There is poison in our midst and our city officials can still afford to dance in the streets?
From the mayor down to the councilor, when will we ever hear a voice – just one, single voice – in the name of Mother Nature?
Hey, Alvin, wazzup?
Traffic in the city of my blissful innocence is bad enough and, barely a year away from the elections, no one’s come up with any bright idea to lick it. Or nobody, from the mayor down, is capable, indeed, to at least think of – no, suggest – a solution to it.
Who cares about noise pollution in the city?
Who cares about our lungs getting invaded incessantly by carbon monoxide?
And, yes, who cares about our rivers that, if we do not make the correct move now, would soon be killed by the deadly bacilli called coliform bacillus?
OK, OK, coliform is an adjective and not a noun, as in coliform being defined as “of, pertaining to, or resembling a coliform bacillus.”
OK, OK, in layman’s term, when a river contains a coliform bacillus (also coliform bacterium), that river suffers from fecal pollution.
OK, OK, you want it more brutal than that?
There is fecal pollution when the river is contaminated with waste matter discharged from the intestines through the anus of man or animals.
Kinda shitty, huh?
Yes. That’s what happens when a river is infested with coliform bacillus. Shitty! Yuk!
Now what about if City Hall is contaminated with a bacterium that attacks the brain? What would become of its occupants?
Select the best answer: No-brainers or brain dead?
Oh, well, they might yet be no-brainers at the moment. Proof of that was the “Bangus Festival” they had just paraded around the city. In reality, that was a “Bangungot Pestebal.” Hey, if they aren’t brain dead yet, they’ll soon be.
Is it right and proper to blame people building illegal shanties on the river banks, waste-spewing factories, for the presence of coliform bacillus in the rivers of Dagupan – and even Binmaley?
Of course.
But the bigger, the biggest, blame should be heaped on our city officials, from the mayor down to the councilor.
Our rivers still teem with bangus, tilapia and other aquatic produce like the world-class malaga, yes, but soon, they’ll be gone – wiped out by coliform bacillus because of man’s own folly.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever start enforcing the law on waste management, the law against illegal fish pens and the law against encroachment on river banks?
Hello, City Hall? Anybody home?
Ah, never mind.
If there’s no use talking to a no-brainer, what more to a brain-dead?
Hey, Alvin, and yes, Dada, wazzup?
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