‘Coping up to’ a problem

Many times people are overwhelmed by the apparent enormity of their challenges. Confronted by what might have persisted, worsened and grown to nightmarish proportions most people develop a sense of frustration that leads to increasing desperation and ultimately, disabling resignation.

For such people often the only refuge left is either cynical pragmatism or near-religious stoicism. In either case, the material challenge – be it the anarchic traffic, the mountainous garbage or the country’s predatory politicians – is often blithely ignored, at times verbally denounced or, much more often simply grimly suffered. These problems are transformed into something people somehow "cope up to" – a most revealing Filipinism in English – but realistically cannot expect to cope with and resolve within a lifetime.

This pervasive sense of popular inefficacy needs to be overcome. People have to learn that most, it not all of the so-called crises besetting the country, indeed can be mastered and brought to successful closure. Perhaps the best way of achieving this psychological transformation is by enabling most of the people and the authorities to have clearer and more experiences of success in problem management.

The complication, however, it that the problem faced by Filipinos nowadays have truly become to formidable that their national management requires cultural re-orientations, political adjustments and logistical allocations that take too much time. By the time these necessary contextual and systemic changes are made at the national level – if and when they are made at all– the specific problems requiring managerial solutions have become mush more serious, making the necessary systemic changes and the level of allocated resources inadequate and possibly even inconsequential or irrelevant.

Many national problems can be downsized, localized down to the level of a small community and made vulnerable to the latter’s limited but highly effective solutions. Consider, for instance, the poor traffic situation which punish people forced to be part of messed-up traffic in parts of Quezon City like the UP Campus and some sections of Katipunan Avenue along Ateneo University and Miriam College. The local barangay officials could be vested by national and city authorities with the direct responsibility for better traffic management in these areas.

These local officials’ regulatory function could be strengthened with the grant of authority to arrest and summarily impose legally mandated penalties for specific traffic violations. Prudentially, local citizen groups could be activated to ensure that those officials enforcing traffic regulations are kept from being abusive and corrupt in the performance of their mandated functions.

More than the Katipunan areas, the UP Diliman campus is a particularly good place for piloting localistic approaches to the problem of vehicular traffic. Although highly permeable to public traffic– public transportation in practically all conceivable form transit the campus daily– the UP area is small enough and could be secured rather easily so that its vehicular traffic is effectively regulated.

The challenge of traffic management in the UP campus is primarily the dutiful enforcement of traffic regulations. It is incredible that in an academic community professing to live by reason and civility, enough resolve has not been found to make safe and civilized driving materialize on campus. Instead, traffic anarchy appears to have been democratized, with just about anyone gripping a steering wheel apparently being hit by a virus that makes it mandatory to run red lights, ignore stop signs, violate one-way streets, park precisely where it is forbidden and otherwise act as to put at risk the lives of pedestrians and other drivers!

The local UP police hardly does anything to improve the situation. Often, uniformed members of UP’s Finest are seen philosophically contemplating the anarchic driving of professors, students, jeepney drivers, taxi drivers and – at times– those of their own uniformed colleagues. Hardly anyone gets to be accosted for a moving traffic violation in UP Diliman. The same thing might be said in relation to blatant and repeated illegal parking.

There is every reason to anticipate that UP can cope with and does not have to "cope up to" its traffic challenge in Diliman. Its human and material resources are relatively adequate to the task of managing vehicular traffic at least in its main quadrangle as well as the quadrangle’s immediately peripheral streets. So why has its traffic situation not improved much across the year?

Downsizing and locally managing a problematic situation requires that both the local authorities and the citizens of the local community be conjoined in politically willing that the situation be truly improved. In the case of UP in its Diliman campus, the university authorities and those comprising UP’s much-vaunted community of scholars, the bureaucracy and its police arms, and the general campus community have an excellent opportunity to show the nation what can be done to reverse a problematic condition.

It is possible the UP authorities and their local Diliman constituency might yet decide that higher education could also embrace a community’s efficient traffic management.

That decision would serve Metro Manilans well. They would no longer have to motor to Subic to see for themselves what responsible and civilized driving is supposed to be. UP people of course can congratulate themselves for becoming a model driving community in the process of improving their campus’ vehicular traffic. They will have proven that democracy is not antithetical to either order or discipline. If that is not higher education, then what is?