What hath Haiyan wrought

A KICK in the gut.

Howling, no, make that screaming – at ear-shattering pitch – winds. Blinding sheets of rain. Surging, rampaging water – the sea claiming land way beyond the shore.

Devastation. Ships pushed way too inland. Buildings flattened to the ground. Houses reduced to broken matchsticks. Communities wiped out. Streets littered as much with debris as with the dead. Utter devastation.

A TUG At the heart.

A father carrying his lifeless child in his arms. The pained anguish of a mother weeping over her dead daughter lying on the pew of a church in ruins.  A son pulling his father out of a jumble of fallen trees, blown off roofs, upturned cars. A husband cooking what he has foraged from the detritus, the blanket shrouded remains of his wife and daughter by his side. A mother cradling her dead baby swaddled in rags. And Death has not stopped its reaping.    

Hungry, thirsty, homeless, hopeless victims driven to desperate means looting what is left of anything.

A BLAST in the head.

“Buhay ka pa naman, di ba? (You’re still alive, aren’t you?).” Snapped the visibly irate President at a Tacloban businessman reporting he was shot at by a looter.

Thereafter, walking out of his own briefing, miffed over supposedly exaggerated data of death and destruction and unpreparedness on the ground.

The President – true to character – outsourcing blame: “Yung Tacloban, hesitant lang ako. Para bang hindi ganun ka prepared (Tacloban seemed unprepared) … compared to other areas…” Buffering this with what he said was the “low casualty count” in the latter. And warned the former will “have to explain” the number of casualties in their areas: “Any casualty is an issue with me.”

Yeah? Has it ever occurred to this BS Aquino III that the storm surge that accounted for most of the casualties in Tacloban spared his personally considered “well-prepared” areas?

Then, there is the President, on primetime TV: “The delivery of food, water, and medicines to the most heavily affected areas is at the head of our priorities. We have tasked barangays to deliver and distribute these vital needs; 24,000 family food packs were already distributed in Tacloban yesterday; and these efforts are centralized in the eight largest barangays there.”

That was Monday, the third day since the disaster. On the fifth day, Wednesday, CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper reported from “miserable, miserable…” Tacloban: “You would expect perhaps to see a feeding center that had been set up 5 days after the storm. We haven’t seen that, certainly not in this area. Some food is being brought to people here at the airport, some water being distributed but these are very, very difficult conditions for the people here on the ground and it’s not clear how much longer it can continue like this. Something’s got to give."

Making a veritable, if verifiable, liar in BS Aquino III thus: “Certainly, US military personnel are here on the ground. There’s a group of marines here, they’ve set up operation. They’ve checked out the airport. That is underway and that cannot come soon enough. But as for who exactly is in charge of the Philippine side of this operation, that is not really clear. I’m just surprised. I expected on this day 5, I thought I’ve maybe gotten here very late, that things would be well in hand. It does not seem like that."

Spake Cooper of the odiously obvious: “When I was in Japan, right after the tsunami there two years ago, within a day or two, you had Japanese defense forces going out, carving up cities into grids and going out on foot looking for people, walking through the wreckage. We have not seen that here in any kind of large-scale operation.”

THE BLOOD boils.

That this – Cooper’s well-grounded observations – could obtain even as international aid – in men, material, money – is surging into the Philippines, is less  an indictment than a damnation of the kind of leadership this country has.

TIME TO pray then.

Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.