Instant experts

While everybody has made a new cottage industry out of kicking up a storm over the devastating effects of the two typhoons that recently hit Metro Manila and Northern Luzon one after the other, yet another howler is racing toward nearly the same area.

And incredibly, nobody seems to have seen the point, that all this finger-pointing is actually pointless. If there is anybody at fault, it is the weather. Because for all the bitching there is really nothing anyone can do against forces that are beyond anyone’s control.

The instant experts, especially those television anchors who talk as if they know everything, have succeeded in causing heads to roll in agencies that were actually helpless to do anything under the circumstances.

One guy who was in-charge of opening the floodgates at one of the dams in Luzon has reportedly been axed after the instant experts never ceased assailing the floodgates opening as if they themselves had the expertise to make such determinations.

For all we know, had the dam released water earlier, as the television hosts insisted, or did not release water at all, as the same instant experts similarly insisted (they were all over the logical spectrum, I tell you), they would still be assailing what circumstances ensued.

In other words, it would be damned if you do and damned if you don’t when it comes to those dams in Luzon, as far as the television studio experts are concerned. They are totally oblivious to the fact that, as far as the weather is concerned, nobody can really tell.

Weather-related devastation is being experienced all over the world. Floods are not only swamping the Philippines, they are also swamping other countries with relatively more modern weather data gathering and predicting technologies than us, such as China and India.

And while floods are swamping many parts of Asia, dust storms are kicking up so much misery in Australia, and brush fires are eating up both vegetation and houses in America, most particularly in California.

But nobody is engaging in any finger-pointing in these areas, or at least not in the same levels of insanity that we do in these parts. Even the Senate of the Philippines saw it fit to conduct an investigation into the weather, for God’s sake.

Does this mean that the people in these areas are more sensible than Filipinos? We do not think so. We just happen to have the proclivity to attach blame. Finding fault seems to be always in our system, driving our passions in ways they are never driven otherwise.

And believe me, it is the media that is at the center of all this blaming activity. Not that the media should shy away from ascribing any blame since it has an adversarial role to play in society.

But please let us not shoot from the hip. As media, we ought to be certain of the facts and not because finger-pointing happens to be the passion of the moment. If opening floodgates of a dam during rainstorms is a necessary course of action, let us say so and be right about it.

Unfortunately, not only do we give vent to passion more than we do reason, we also do not know when enough is enough. We love to push the envelope even if we are pushing in the wrong direction.

Now some instant experts, continuing to strike while the iron is hot, want to disable the dams altogether. All fired up only one-dimensionally and feeding on the fears stoked by their own ignorance, they want to decommission the dams at the expense of all other benefits dams bring.

If they succeed and power and rice shortages ensue on account of the shutting down of all turbines and irrigation systems dependent on the dam, the instant experts will once again take center stage and blame others, conveniently forgetting it all started from them.