Shell-shocked

“People are walking like zombies looking for food,” said a medical student in Leyte. “It’s like a movie.”

Like “World War Z,” like “The Walking Dead.” And like a movie, it unfolded slowly, almost benignly, to reveal a creeping nightmare, a panorama of pain and anguish, a descent into hell. When I started writing about “Yolanda” last weekend, I had no inkling of the depth of its destructiveness, of the scale of its destruction. Though I had been swiftly disabused of the impression, gotten from the blitheness with which the capital had sprung back from a rain-drenched night to sun-drenched morning, I still had no idea about the scale of Nature’s mayhem. That would come gradually, mind-bogglingly, horrifically.

Each day brought a fresh revelation, each more ghastly than the last. First were the numbers. It started with just a score or so, graduated into 100 dead in Tacloban City, ballooned into 1,200 in the Visayas generally, courtesy of the Red Cross, and soared to 10,000 from reports by local officials themselves (the last group warning that the way things were going, that number was bound to go up still more). Those are numbers that come from a war, the kind that rains bombs on hapless civilians. Those are numbers that come from a tsunami bursting in on a helpless populace.

And a war or tsunami was what Tacloban seemed to have been hit with. I had just said some weeks ago that I was glad Bohol had been flattened only by an earthquake—and it is a testament to the trials and tribulations we are currently enduring that we can now talk of earthquakes as something relatively benign—and not with an accompanying tsunami. Though the earthquake had crumpled churches and turned them into powdery rubble, the residents of Bohol could still be thankful a wall of water had not swept them and their loved ones away.

And now this. Observers would say in awe that they were reminded of Aceh and Fukushima after a giant tidal wave tumbled into them in the wake of a massive earthquake. Tacloban bore the terrible resemblance. A ship has been moored on land like a beached whale, its metal hulk unable to withstand the howling wind, and there it sat among the debris strewn by the storm. The debris included the dead, which were lined up on the street, if not indeed left where they were or simply thrown into the pile, scores of them. The dead fused with the living, grieving mothers and fathers clutching their children in their arms, their lamentations turning into a collective wail under desolate skies. Dogs sniffed at the abandoned bodies and stragglers descended upon them looking for loot with which to trade for food.

The city itself was dead. Or so as its beleaguered living saw it. “Tacloban is totally destroyed,” said a public school teacher. “Some people are losing their minds from hunger or from losing their families.”

That was how Fukushima looked, too, in the wake of the mouth of water that swallowed the town and spat out cars, houses and people. Except for one thing, which was that the residents of Fukushima never rioted. I still remember the story of that kid who, after being given rations by a kindly cop as he stood at the end of the line, went on to share it with others. It brought tears to the cop’s eyes. I guess Tacloban will have its share of stories of acts of kindness or gestures of altruism, but for now all we can see is the mob, crazed by hunger, despair, and twisted opportunity, that burst into Gaisano and various shops, the guards helpless before their desperate fury, and carted away food and essentials. Unfortunately, not all they took were essentials, the hoodlums among them carting away TV sets as well.

It was as huge a breakdown in peace and order as you’d see in war, famine, or a zombie movie. It’s the face of desperation. It’s the face of chaos. It’s the face of a catastrophe beyond belief. I had no inkling last weekend it was this bad, and each day continues to offer new depths of grimness.

Which is the scary part. “Worst” is the word we keep hearing these days. This was the worst typhoon to hit us ever, and true enough I was wrong to imagine that even its namesake, “Yoling,” came close to it. Before this, the earthquake that hit Bohol was the worst to have hit us in a long time, at least the worst since the earthquake that shook Baguio more than a couple of decades ago. Elsewhere, Hurricane “Sandy” was the worst to hit the US eastern seaboard, the tornadoes, one coming after another, were the worst to have swept across the American Midwest, the tsunamis that hit Aceh and Fukushima were the worst to have engulfed them, the floods that overran Central Europe were the worst to have happened since the same floods that overran it 10 years ago.

The worst is what’s happening to the world today, and with alarming rapidity. A couple of years ago when most of us were thanking God or our lucky stars we hadn’t been hit by a disaster like Japan, I was being niggled by the chilling thought of when it would. The only thing I was really thankful for was that we did not have a nuclear plant.

Frankly, I don’t know how you can prepare for the worst in these precarious times, let alone prevent it. Short of putting some sense in the world’s leaders that the only war worth fighting is the war to save the planet. Short of abolishing crushing poverty in this country to allow people to spring back from death and destruction, if not avoid them entirely. One year later, Fukushima stood back on its feet proudly; it was as if the tsunami never happened. That is resilience, the capacity to grieve deeply, the ability to rebuild determinedly.

I leave others to their advice, to their prayers, to their words of comfort. Right now, I’m just too shell-shocked to offer any.