Punchline
Tamed expectations of Ompong
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
NOW that Dagupan City had the fortune (or misfortune) of not only having seen and lived through but happily survived the two extended severe flooding in the last 30 days, city hall and residents’ expectations of post-Ompong can be measured rationally.
When the first flood that lasted a week hit the city, everyone was grasping straws. The common reaction was that of disbelief, and faultfinding became the convenient pastime.
Everyone wondered! Anyare? How can this happen? Why didn’t the Belen administration work for an anti-flooding program? This never happened under the Lim administration! Etc…etc. Everyone was being faulted but themselves.
Now that the floodwaters have subsided, bashers finally ran out of breath, and city government got busy as a bee, restoring normalcy in community life in the barangays, the causes of the flooding were finally tracked and confirmed. Medium term and long terms solutions are being offered, no longer simply short term solutions.
And as it turned out, there was no way the city government or any government in the past could have prevented the amount of floodwater that literally engulfed the city, not in the past 30 years unless there was a way that anyone could have predicted that week. PAGASA admitted it could not have done so.
Now that people are more knowledgeable of the constraints and limitations of their communities, their vulnerabilities to uncontrollable situations of neighboring towns, Dagupeños can be expected not to be fazed, to be more understanding if not tolerant of the flooding that will again make their lives difficult.
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SOCIALIZING IN MEDIA. As I mull the possible extent of damage that will be caused by Ompong, my mind found itself traveling back to the future. How we, as a people, survived and evolved through more than 100 typhoons, accompanying torrential rains, the series of earthquakes, etc. What came to mind was how we evolved in communicating dangers and risks, family life, business and personal relations.
It’s about how we came to the world of social media today.
The social media today can be likened to the era when telephone was first experienced by communities. Without the telephone, neighbors largely kept to themselves. Nobody had time to be neighborly to chitchat and gossip. Out here in the countryside, rumors were traced mostly to barber shops, sari-sari stores and market. When telephone service came into being, suddenly opportunities for communication became endless, never mind that we started a phone that required a lot of human interference.
When telephones were first introduced in Dagupan in the early 50s, the supply could not meet the huge demand for the service. It was so bad that the only option then was for the phone company to adopt the line-sharing policy. It was called “party-line” system.
Families and offices had no choice but to work with “party-line” system. To those born after the 50s, a “party-line” was usually a neighbor with whom you share a single phone line and only one household can use the telephone at any given time. While party-liners could communicate with each other being neighbors, only a few bothered to make it so.
In fact, the only time one got to talk to the party-line (neighbor) was when one had to interrupt the phone conversation of the other so the caller can use the line. A shabby practice was to eavesdrop on the conversation of the neighbor. Consequently, because of “party-line” sharing, many neighbors became hostile to each other instead of being the best of neighbors.
“Call-waiting” service was also available through the telephone operator. It was the lady operator, she with a cheery or sultry voice, controlled one’s use of the phone. She could be talked into interrupting a conversation to allow you to intrude, or get you queued as the next caller to a subscriber. In fact, since there was no phone dialing feature, one had to wait for the phone operator to assist you with her pleasant “Number please?” And if you happened not to know the number, all you had to do was to give the name of the person you wanted to call and courteous operator was there to help.
I still remember the number assigned to the Sunday Punch office in 1955: 28-91!
Speaking of phone operators, one felt he/she had no choice but to trust them with your secrets, whom you called and who called you regularly. How so? They’re the ones who make it happen that you get connected to one another. They were the ones whom one would not dare cross.
That’s as far as socializing in media went in those days.
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NEIGHORS VS. FRIENDS. Back to today, (yesterday’s future) it’s been quite a big leap since from the party-line communication to today’s conversation via the internet. The use of landline for one-on-one communication has become the remaining survivor of the line communication system.
Social media has veered away completely from it Who would have thought that people could converse and communicate with thousands of strangers (euphemistically labeled as “Friends” by Facebook) simultaneously at any given time by text, sound and video.
Being neighborly is already far from anyone’s mind. Who needs a neighbor when you can have neighborly relations with 100 “Friends”?
Who needs a phone on the wall when you can talk and communicate while walking, running or making out on the sofa?
But the onset of today’s phone technology has another thing coming. People no longer use a phone but a camera with a phone! A technology that wiped out only the camera-film system, print picture album but the solitary mode of use of telephone.
Given these developments, us surviving baby-boomers are grateful to have witnessed and experienced these giant leaps in technology. Millennials will have their own wonders in technology to look forward to, i.e., solemnizing weddings between lovers a thousand miles apart, choosing gender of children, facial reconstruction in community beauty salons, meeting a stranger whose full background is known within seconds, policemen armed with lethal guns that kill will solar rays, not bullets, ride a bicycle two meters above the ground, having virtual sex on a screen without physical contact, etc.
The potential is limitless. The only thing that perhaps technology cannot hope to change is death. One can live longer, look younger but death will remain inevitable.
The baby-boomers generation can perhaps be credited for making such a bold claim.
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LOCAL POLITICS IN 2019. Talks of political alignments among local politicians are now making barbers shops and coffee shops buzz with speculations.
I surmise that soon, talks about ousting either President Duterte or his mortal political enemies are going to be irrelevant. Alignment with President Duterte will blur local political affiliations but local party affiliations will be irrelevant to national politics since 2019 will be a mid-term elections.
What will remain is personality politics. Who gets to help who, with what. Bottom line? Vote-buying will still make the difference. Tsk tsk.
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