Hasta Mañana, Baybeh!

My brother, Mike, made a good observation about how we Filipinos love to postpone doing things until later, which is usually too late, indeed! The triple whammy that hit us last December was waker-upper! Unding, Yoyong, and Violeta came in rapid succession like semi-automatic gunfire with Unding coming out the worst after having given us an unforgettable destructive encore! Before and during Unding’s rip-roaring performance some people ignored some amateur typhoon trackers’ warnings of Unding’s terrific force and thought it better to wait for the now hopeless Pag-Asa’s belated reports resulting in really dire consequences! The disastrous inundation that followed was all the more made horrible by the islands of logs that floated by giving frank witness to the government’s inability to stop illegal loggers, who allegedly, are “protected” by big time politicians who just don’t know where and how to stop gobbling up money, money, and more money!

Congressman Joe de Venecia’s baby would’ve probably still be alive right now had he acted at once on seeing to it that his bullet-proof windows and grills would be easy to open “escape” from! The Tsunami victims wouldn’t have reached such a fantastic number had the early warning systems been put in place long before that intensity 9 earthquakes rocked the seabed and raised the waves to cataclysmic proportions! The killer landslide wouldn’t have happened had the trees not been cut indiscriminately!

It really seems like all calamities and mishaps could’ve been avoided had we just tried to be a bit more diligent in really doing what should’ve been just WHEN it should’ve been done! Not a day, week, or month later, but RIGHT AWAY! Getting right down to the nitty-gritty of things is a talent which most of us really lack. Doing things later can, perhaps, be blamed on our Spanish ancestors which we now easily refer to as the “mañana habit”. A lot of deaths, destruction, and economic losses could’ve been avoided had we not left for tomorrow what we should have done today!”

We all know about this fact but still we refuse to mend our ways, hoping against hope that ignoring things we really don’t want will make them go away! But, alas, they don’t and we are left with the task of rebuilding things right from the very start when we should be doing something else better! Like writing this article and trying to beat the deadline when I could’ve done this earlier so I can now be relaxing and listening to really good music and singing to everyone: “HASTA MAÑANA, BAYBEH”!