Off to a bad start

We make New Year resolutions only to break them—sometimes right on New Year’s Day itself. I know someone who adopts a personal “buzzword” for the year—in effect, a theme summed up in a word—essentially describing the main change she will pursue for herself in the year ahead. Her buzzword for the coming year will be “strength,” she said. In another Viber group I’m in, the agreed theme was “health and wealth.”

If there’s a buzzword the whole nation could adopt as its theme for change in 2019, I’d like it to be “discipline.”

My last piece on our lack of discipline was provoked by disturbing images of a litter-ridden Rizal Park in the aftermath of Christmas Day. While hoping otherwise, I foresaw the same thing happening a week later—and sure enough, on Jan. 1, a news banner read: “Thousands of New Year’s Eve revelers leave truckloads of trash at Rizal Park.” But little did I expect that I would spend a good part of New Year’s Day being a victim of yet another familiar sign of Filipinos’ undisciplined behavior (and something I’ve written about here more than once). I refer to selfish and unruly motorists further clogging up already-congested Manila-bound traffic at Pansol, Calamba City in Laguna—a perennial shame that neither local nor national authorities seem to care enough to do something about. And I’m sure Pansol is only one of many more similar chokepoints in the country.

Being on that dreaded stretch of road was not part of my New Year’s Day plans. But my pregnant and fragile daughter Mel and her husband Li had a car breakdown there as they headed back home from our family’s long holiday weekend celebrations in Los Baños. So I dropped everything to come to their rescue, along with my twin sons MR and MC (that’s Miguel Ramon and Manuel Celestino—names only an economist, with marginal revenue and marginal cost in mind, could inflict on his offspring!).

We knew traffic would be bad, but we didn’t expect it would take us two full hours to traverse the 5 kilometers to where Mel and Li were stuck, with the last kilometer stretch taking half of that time. At the wheel, MR wasn’t allowing himself to get stressed up by it all. “Give way to his honor, Mr. VIP,” or “Yes, go right ahead, Mr. Senator,” he humorously and sarcastically quipped as cars zipped by one by one on the improper counterflow lane, in seeming entitlement to jump the queue ahead of everyone else. Soon the trickle turned into a flow as more undisciplined motorists followed suit, and eventually turned into another full lane of vehicles squarely occupying one of the two opposite lanes. By then, what had earlier been a crawling flow had turned into a near-standstill, with the gridlock that these undisciplined motorists must have created up ahead.

We eventually reached the disabled car, and after managing to pull it into a gasoline station to safely park it there for the night, we all headed back home to Los Baños. But we found the single remaining lane of the two supposed southbound ones blocked parts of the way by even thicker-faced counterflow drivers and onrushing motorcycle riders who insisted on taking even the only lane left for opposing traffic. And through it all, not a single traffic enforcer was in sight (you’d think the national or Calamba City government would deploy a special contingent of traffic enforcers for predictable instances such as this; no such luck). And where there’s no enforcement, all discipline flies out the window.

“You can see why I’m tempted to move to a more disciplined country,” remarked MC, father of two, who also constantly rants about excessive regulations and documentary requirements taking half of his time away from running his small business. I couldn’t blame him. He has personally experienced life in Japan, Korea and Singapore—places where people actually have the discipline to follow rules.

On my last column, one reader commented: “When the top leader has the most outrageous behavior, expecting the people to (exercise discipline) sounds out of tune.”

They say that what you do on Jan. 1, you’re bound to be doing the rest of the year. It seems we’re off to a bad start—with no relief in sight.

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