I was again covering an event near Manila Bay and I got a chance to sit down again at the ridge and look at the vast expanse before me.
The sight was beautiful, especially around this time when the sun was about to set and the clouds turning a shade of orange and the water reflecting the fading light above. I ignored the stench of the putrid waters as I gazed at the sunset.
Beside me was a woman on her thirties eating Kwek-Kwek, a street food where a duck egg is covered in a dough mixture and deep fried, while noisily talking to her friend.
I glanced on the surroundings and saw the trash scattered around the bay. When the woman beside me finished her snack, she threw the styro container right into the bay. I looked at where she threw her trash and saw a big pile of rotting garbage right below where we were seated. Now I know where the stench was coming from. I was disgusted. With her and with the bay.
A professor told me once before that you can gauge a country’s state by looking at the trash in the streets..In other countries like in Hong Kong and Singapore, you can see how clean the streets are and how well the people behaved. There are laws prohibiting trash that is being observed by the citizens and nobody tries to violate the law since they know they will be sanctioned accordingly.
Now look at the Philippines. We have laws against littering. We have laws against throwing trash at the bay. We have laws protecting our environment against pollutants, but are they being followed?
The problem of Philippine politics is not just the implementation of the government, but also the people living in the government. Of course we know that the Philippine bureaucracy is suffering from degradation brought by corruption, but that does not mean the citizens have the right to violate the law.
Perhaps if we look closely, the government is being run by the Filipinos, and it was the Filipinos who voted for them for a seat in the government. Does the problem really lie with the government or does it really lie within ourselves, as citizens of the country? As Filipinos?
