The voiceless are indeed a useful scapegoat. So is God.

The rain is pouring down in droves. As of this writing (3:53 AM), the water is up to our waists and still rising outside. Inside, my aunt’s shoes are bobbing up and down amid the furniture.

Thunder and lighting are assaulting the skies like a page out of Dante’s inferno. The ground shakes so much I think the phenomenon deserves a whole new chapter in the meteorological textbooks (thunder-quakes, perhaps?) and in PAG-ASA’s announcements that are almost predictably inaccurate. I’ve experienced flooding of this scale as a child. But only after several days of rain, which would come in waves, on and off. Even then the rain was never this bad or non-stop.

It’s a miracle my cousin managed to connect us to the internet. It’s been impossible to get back to sleep.

While the whole experience feels theatrically apocalyptic, I hope we stop blaming god at some point and start blaming ourselves. And more than ourselves: for it is the systematic denial of the truth about climate change and the evasion of actual solutions to the crisis that have made such storms a frightening reality.

Storms and flooding, you see, are natural events. When they come as a result of polluting industries and a dependence on fossil fuels that have caused global warming and have amplified storms to such devastating heights, they can only be man-made.

Call it nature’s revenge, or divine retribution for human greed. Either way, those least responsible for the destruction of the environment are again having to deal with its worst impacts. The planet is groaning underfoot, and the underdog gets the raw end of the deal.

In the days to come, journalists and mayors and presidential spokespeople and presidential hopefuls from DILG will doubtless take this opportunity to blame flooding on the urban poor. They will pump the airwaves with bullshit , while doing nothing about our 70s-era drainage systems and while forcibly evicting thousands of families who live nowhere near the city’s waterways (esteros). They will frame solutions to climate change as a matter of individual life style choices, while exploring none of its root causes. Some will deny climate change entirely.

None of them will allow the public to recognise the obvious fact that the sheer volumes of rain now pouring down our streets would be enough to flood Abu Dhabi and New York City combined, twice over. Many of them, like Napoles and her ilk, live in walled subdivisions or high-rise condominums, and are thus safely cocooned from both flooding and the rest of society. The rest of us would rather blame the inhabitants of Tondo, or the return of Christ. This is not surprising.

For this is the perfect opportunity to get the government’s pet projects underway. To sweep the scum off the streets, so it can put a casino or mall in their place.

This response from the public, the media and our leaders is by all accounts irrational, irresponsible, and inhumane. It is also a dangerously dishonest denial of basic scientific truths. To point a finger of blame on those who already live their lives in absolute squalor - turning their suffering into a double tragedy - is pure cowardice. To blame climate change on the Book of Revelations, and so strip ourselves of our collective responsibility to nature and our fellow man, is to deceive ourselves, while those with the resources to turn things around indulge instead in mindless consumerism, and are driven to wage a systematic assault on the planet by their pursuit of profit.

I can only imagine what this must feel like to people who live under bridges or in relocation sites in Bulacan and Rizal, which are even more prone to flooding and landslides than their shanties back in Manila.

The voiceless are indeed a useful scapegoat. So is God.

ref : https://www.facebook.com/cjchanco/posts/10153144967035514