It saddens me to see how when there’s a storm happening outside of us, that an inner one simultaneously happens too. Recently, there’s been so much hatred online for how the government has handled the disaster relief operations so poorly, if they were moving at all. There were some public officials that got lots of ire too for leaving out the provinces they held jurisdiction over.
This has recently been a point of reflection – one person commented how government officials have always been this way, but without the megaphone that is social media, they didn’t really get as much anger for every single thing they did wrong. And this doesn’t just apply to them. So many people – regular citizens at that – get permanently scarred via the slander that they get every time they mess up or displease some people.
It’s a good thing that those who used to not have a voice now have the power to speak up against certain injustices. But this instrument, this power tends to get abused, too. People can blow up one-sided stories and paint an ugly picture of whoever they feel has wronged them. Those in question can have their own ways of dealing with such defamation, but dealing with so much collective fury and picking yourself up after someone has already drawn first blood can be quite traumatizing, too.
I do not wish to say that we can tolerate the mishandling of responsibilities especially when we pay hefty taxes for these people to serve us. These are random musings in my head as well of how there is a tool at our disposal to help air out concerns, but a lot of the time, it can be taken too far, and it doesn’t really help instill a good culture of how to handle conflict properly. This behavior sadly trickles down to not just political affairs but to personal ones as well. And because the platform is so free for all, it tends to get abused all too often.
Anyway, back to the storms. I do think the mishandling of power, funds, and responsibility needs to be called out. So much damage to property has been witnessed. Stress and even extreme trauma on those who were at living at the heart of the storm will need a lot of time and resources to recover. Can’t there be a more sustainable way to prevent these disasters in the future? Does a whole city have to come down every time a storm comes this way? Where do we start with more sustainable practices for typhoons, and making sure that there is minimal damage to life and property? This is getting tiring, and the citizens have been expressing “donation-fatigue” above everything. We shouldn’t have to be the ones carrying the burden of saving those that have been stricken by disaster every time. Where do all the taxes go if relief drives and private donations are where most of the relief capabilities come from?
This is all very tiring to think about. But these are the events of the past week, and I couldn’t let it pass without airing it out.