Tears, anger, frustration

By Alex P. Vidal

 

“Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.”—Dale Carnegie

 

ALTHOUGH it was a common knowledge that the late Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA) administrator Lorenzo “Larry” Jamora was a close political ally of the late former Iloilo City mayor Mansueto “Mansing” Malabor, he never showed up in the City Hall to throw his weight around during Malabor’s halcyon years.

We founded the Iloilo City Hall Press Corps (ICHPC) during the Malabor administration and we never noticed Mr. Jamora flex his muscles and show all and sundry he was “the big boss” behind Malabor’s meteoric political rise.

But he did maintain a “cordial” relationship with selected media personalities on a case to case basis.

Unlike other local politicians and political padrinos in the private sector, Mr. Jamora, 73, never “advertised” his “good working relationship” with his chosen media friends, but was careful not to offend reporters who didn’t have a deeper knowledge about his relationship with Malabor.

My last interview with him was a “standing position” in the tinapayan section of the Atrium Mall in Iloilo City in 2006. Then Bombo Radyo anchorman and future city councilor Rodel Fullon joined us in the latter part of that informal interview.

Mr. Jamora was contemplating on “resigning” as LWUA boss, but President Gloria Arroyo refused to let him go.

If he didn’t like the style of one anchorman or newspaper writer, Mr. Jamora would openly criticize the “lousy” media personality but only within the hearing distance of his trusted acolytes and associates, never in public.

He never humiliated a media personality. I can’t remember Jamora filing any libel case against a media practitioner who criticized him during his controversial stint in the LWUA.

Mr. Jamora would have been one of the best Iloilo city mayors.

Rest in peace, Administrator Jamora.

 

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BECAUSE our common enemy everywhere we go today is the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), tears, anger, and frustration appear to have succeeded in dividing and conquering us.

An aghast and visibly terrified Iloilo City Mayor Geronimo “Jerry” Treñas is now undergoing a 14-day quarantine after being exposed to two confirmed local COVID-19 patients.

He was in tears earlier and couldn’t hide his frustrations over reports of the increasing number of COVID-19 cases in Western Visayas especially in Iloilo City.

The city mayor must have felt like Sisyphus, condemned by the gods for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top, as a metaphor for the individual’s persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life.

The city mayor has been doing his darn best these past five months to protect his constituents from being infected and help lift them from economic meltdown, but the coronavirus was hell-bent to outpace and outlive his herculean tasks.

The wear and tear of mounting a fight against an almost unbeatable and invisible foe has definitely taken a toll on Treñas and other local chief executives in the country with a similar predicament.

 

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Like many Ilonggos, Treñas must have thought the coronavirus pandemic would start to decline in the third quarter this year after a tumultuous onslaught in the opening months of 2020 in the Philippines and in other parts of the globe.

But just when most of us were preparing to bounce back to normal life in July, the pandemic began to form a metastatic attack.

We were all wrong. Nobody got it right.

COVID-19 has refused to call it quits and there are strong signs it won’t leave until our treasury has been emptied to the last centavo in 2021.

This has made the national leadership angrier and frustrated.

Instead of fighting the pandemic as one nation, politicians and their subalterns are the ones at loggerheads and blaming each other for the spike of the cases of infection like the COVID-19 was intentionally brought to the Philippines so that contending political parties and partisan lackeys and lap puppies will have the basis to bury each other alive.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)