RESILIENT people are those that have the ability to adjust, to recover readily from adversity, life changes, illnesses.

Indeed, the touted resiliency of Filipinos has shown that we always recovered and adjusted to a life, coping with more than 20 typhoons every year, some deadly and destructive.

We have found it as a way of consoling and compensating ourselves in the face of personal adversities, particularly when faced with millions in damage to farmers, food, school buildings, etc. including deaths of innocent people. It kept us alive, moving on forward.

Alas, our resiliency as a people is taking its toll on governance. We have stopped demanding and looking for accountability from our local and national governments.

We readily move on, and away from images of destruction and emotional impact of the experience like it is only the most appropriate response to the tragedy that befalls us each time our communities are slammed by natural calamity. Our resiliency is viewed by our public officials that we are willing to forget (and forgive) the lapses we suffered on account of their complacency and incompetence to govern.

In fact, through the decades from the 60s, we have been exposed to almost the same scenarios each time a super typhoon or earthquake hits us.  The responses and lapses were almost predictable, including the reporting of damage to agriculture, evacuation plans, distribution of relief goods, etc. Our resiliency was also predictable.

Except for the 5% calamity fund, most if not all, local governments simply rely on the declaration of a state of calamity to trigger the same responses. In fact, no annual budget of any town and city in Pangasinan allocates funds specific for rescue and evacuation of affected barangays during natural calamities.

While our local governments try to do all to alleviate the situation, the same scenario they’ve seen over the years, it’s obvious that most never learned lessons from past and most recent responses to our emergencies. “Basta gumalaw, OK na!”

Without much ado, once the state of emergency is deemed over, local governments resume their pre-emergency activities without reviewing and evaluating how effective or useless their response was.  Could it be because our resiliency was already acknowledged and lauded?

Resilience should already mean a need to demand for accountability from our public officials.

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