EDITORIAL

Tests of resiliency

CENTRAL Pangasinan has just barely recovered from the extended severe flooding in
the last 30 days and here comes Typhoon Ompong again threatening to swamp
Dagupan City and its neighbors with floodwaters and with far more damaging
impact over the weekend.

Fortunately and as expected, the resilience of our people in coping with calamities
took on the recent losses and damages head on, enough to prepare our communities
though grudgingly, for another bout with the wrath of nature.

It is not possible to see our towns and cities fully prepared and protected from the
onslaught of super typhoons and storm surges. In fact, all local governments can
only learn from past experiences to gauge preparations because no city or town
never had the luxury of having enough resources to plan and develop for future
calamities.

This is a fact of life in our country that we must accept, and should not be cause for
faultfinding among our local government leaders. No community can ever be
immune from damaging impact of natural calamities.

We can, and we have to, rely on our tested resiliency to overcome difficult
challenges. But this is not to say that we should tolerate ineptness and complacency
of our local officials who’ve had lessons to learn from calamity each each time.

Trillanes to Duterte: ‘Thank you, Sir’

IS President Duterte making a hero out of Sen. Trillanes? Seemingly, yes. That’s
because by subjecting Trillanes to a position of perceived persecution, Mr. Duterte
could be inadvertently driving the gullible to the senator’s side. Didn’t the President
himself fire that double-edged question: “If there are soldiers sympathetic to
Trillanes, by all means, they can join Trillanes anytime.”

At the rate Mr. Trillanes has been maximizing his media exposure at every
opportunity in fighting the President’s revocation of his amnesty, the senator might
already be gaining adherents. Trillanes surely knows how to play the media with
his exaggerated claims. His unexpected situation has been giving him immense
media mileage. Even his decision to continue sleeping in the Senate building seems
part of the plan to attract continued media coverage.

Indeed, Trillanes never had it so good. And he has only Mr. Duterte to thank for.