Two kinds of starvation
Art: You can’t eat it but you’ll starve without it. “Adoration” by Jay Lozada in One By One, a group exhibition at Monumento art gallery in Marikina Shoe Expo, Cubao. The show opens tonight at 6pm.
You can tell a lot about a country from its road traffic, and the profile presented by Manila traffic is not exactly flattering to Filipinos. Today I was waiting for a taxi. It was lunchtime and vehicular traffic was heavier than usual. The holiday rush has truly begun, although from what I’ve seen people aren’t exactly rushing to clear store shelves of merchandise. I suspect the crowds are rushing because they’re expected to rush, because that is what one does when December sets in.
I was standing on the side of the road when a woman started waving at a passenger bus that was in the middle lane. As the street was congested, and there was not enough room for the bus to maneuver, the bus simply stopped in the middle of the street. The woman ran towards the bus and climbed aboard as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if stopping to pick up passengers in the middle of the freaking street were legal, as if they were not inconveniencing every motorist following the bus and courting a vehicular pile-up.
The Soul of Traffic, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 5th, 2008 at 08:00
Lots of illegal things happening. In Ortigas past midnight you’d occasionally see big bikes speeding through Emerald, though call center people cross this street at all times. Our democracy seems to be a mimicking sort. Precedence for law breaking are done every day. A politician steals, everybody steals. A rich guy ignores traffic light, everybody does the same. Filipino freedom is the freedom to monkey the the most visible criminals.
December 5th, 2008 at 08:04
Great painting though. I wonder why I only see the heavy-handed sort of paintings and other art in Megamall.
Just to add about traffic. Have you ever noticed that well-dressed people when they cross the street don’t have to look left and then right?
December 5th, 2008 at 10:28
That woman is the classic Filipino public transport commuter and that bus driver generalizes the entire Filipino public transport sector. The hell with bus stops. The hell with other motorists. Favorite line of drivers:”naghahanap-buhay kami ng marangal para sa pamilya.” So it doesn’t matter to them if they break all road rules and endanger other motorists. And these are just the bus drivers. Now jeepney drivers are another kind of low-life dangerous morons, and this space may not be enough to curse them all. I’m not a jeepney riding person, not because I’m rich, but because (1) I don’t want to die of respiratory diseases;(2) I don’t want to become a road kill. AND (3) I personally loathe them. (Question: If there is an existing law called “Clean Air Act”, what are these smoke belching rolling junks still doing in our streets?) To jeepney drivers I always say “die!die!”, in which case you may suspect me of being a homicidal maniac. So far none of them have died from my curses. Maybe God has other punishment reserved for them? But I say: drive in any major road anywhere in Metro Manila and you will understand the anger. And to think I’ve been driving for 18 years! All these years, all of the cars I’ve owned were either hit/damaged by wayward jeepneys which were swerving, cutting me off, or doing all their stupid things. ( about five years ago, one actually rammed into my car’s left side, right between the two doors and straight into me, while I was responsibly crossing an intersection.) And the driver had the gall to blame me. I wasn’t hurt, but because of the damage, I took him to the police, I got a lawyer and filed a case. I actually attended three court sessions. Last I heard the driver went into hiding. Nothing happened of it. I take it, you’re not gonna get anything substantial from these miserable creeps. Apparently jeepney devils are exempt from Philippine laws. Alert driver or not, they will wreck your car or kill you, or both. And those darn tricycles? I think I’m gonna have a heart attack.
December 5th, 2008 at 21:53
Now, now. I say that it is not only the public transport driver who is mostly at fault for such an abberation (stopping at the middle of the street) and for other illegal traffic/driving acts, but also the private car drivers.
I think the fault lies in the whole law enforcement system. If there were enough honest law-abiding traffic enforcers and an easy-quick-acting judicial system, then these non-law abiding drivers (both public and private) would be issued summons/tickets, and made to pay money everytime they transgess the law. There is not a surer way to restore sanity in Manila traffic than to force people to cough up money which should go into improving the roads and highways, and yes, the enforcement of traffic laws.
I stayed in Manila for 2 years after many years of living outside of it, and soon discovered that many times, in the wee hours of the morning, I would be the only one stopped at a red light, while others just whizzed by. And then, I also discovered that when an ambulance was frantically passing by to transport a poor, dying patient, both public and private drivers were jockeying up to overtake it, or to totally ignore it. Truly sad.
December 6th, 2008 at 01:24
Bus drivers have their own motto, “Bus stop ko ang mundo.” Same goes for jeepney drivers. How about for those riding motorcycles? Ay sus. Even if it’s their fault in an accident, you’re still paying.