Manila's State of Emergency

I was starting to write this column when I got an email from my cousin living in the U.S. asking about what was happening in the country. She said they have been receiving reports about the declaration of a State of Emergency.

I wish I could report to her something exciting about happenings in Dumaguete in relation to the State of Emergency, but I checked my sources, and they all said nothing was happening here [in the province]. All the trouble is just in Manila. Here in Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, people are going about their daily lives like they did yesterday, and the days before that. You won't even think something is happening in Manila unless you watch TV where the same news is aired and replayed over and over again. In most instances, constant replaying of a message could only give more importance to an event than it actually deserves.

And some people in the Manila media seemed to actually rejoice over the President's misfortunes. It was about 6:04 Friday night when I heard TV commentators laughing with sarcasm at an analogy that when the President declared a state of emergency, she just "jumped from the frying pan into the fire".

That could have been funny, if it weren't serious.

And certainly, these TV commentators would do the nation a great service by drawing the line, and simply declaring where their loyalties lie, instead of misleading people into believing that they are objective, fair, and possess all the noble virtues.

And because people know they are being covered by television, radio and newspapers, they become bolder. If you recall, it has been scientifically established that individual behaviors may be altered because the people know they are being studied (I think they refer to it as the Hawthorne Effect). In this case, the Hawthorne Effect is arrived at when these demonstrators are hounded by journalists.

So much for that.

The bigger news in Negros Oriental Thursday was actually the mass evacuation of thousands of people living along the coastlines of southern Negros Oriental. This was triggered by a text message which read, ""Please pray for Mag-abo, Zamboanguita, Negros Oriental. As per forecast of Pag-asa, there is a tsunami again. Target: Mag-abo, Dauin, Apo, going to Sta. Catalina. Please pass this on."

I asked PNP Provincial Director Sr. Supt "Omar" Buenafe about it. He said that the source of the text message was actually someone working in Hongkong who saw the news about the intensity 7.9 earthquake somewhere in Africa last Thursday. That someone sent the text message to a relative in Zamboanguita, and that must have started the rumor.

As expected, the Pag-Asa also denied having made the forecast. But there was no way of countering the rumor that spread like wildfire. Evacuees were reported from Dauin all the way to Basay. They stayed in mountainous areas and returned to their homes Friday morning.

That's it for now.*

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