Light.

With the modern-day physicist’s current knowledge of the universe, nothing - at all – travels faster than the speed of light. Based on the empirical calculations of his forefathers, light travels at an amazing godlike speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. Usually travelling on a straight path, its propagation can be influenced by the gravitational force of a massive body floating in the universe, say, the Sun. In addition, depending on the opacity of the object in collision, a ray of light with a certain wavelength may not be able to pass through it. Nevertheless, regardless of its bendable nature and variable penetrative power, Light travels faster than anything else, and perhaps, to him, that is all that matters.

But it seems that certain circumstances prevent us from seeing things. Perhaps the very notions that it can only travel on a straight path and pass through a specific object, already give us a sufficient idea that a cashier can steal her employer’s money in the cash register while he is inside the toilet; that a man inside a car with tinted windows can drive along the highway stretch with his left steering the wheel and his right veering his pussy plunger like a gear shift lever; that a revered, retired army general in his 60s can spend a lovely afternoon reading People Magazine while ostentatiously singing and dancing to the beat of Madonna’s Vogue; that a stout, ugly and sickly mother of five badass children can find enough reasons to divorce (or even better, kill) his good-for-nothing husband by secretly finding out the existence of his online PerfectMatch account which he uses to impregnate his lifeless Saturday evenings. While light allows anyone to see and witness anything within the range of his stereoscopic vision, regardless of whether or not they bring about human pleasure or satisfaction, the limitations to its immense power actually lie in our inability to break the physical, impenetrable barriers caused by us ourselves. We cannot be in more than one place at the same time. We cannot see things beyond mountains. We cannot see what’s underneath the sea. While light is everywhere, we - in any moment in time – can only be somewhere, at some place, and not anywhere else.

Perhaps the invention of high-speed Internet has somewhat overcome these barriers. It has allowed man to access the world and circumnavigate its entirety as if he was the sole commander of his very own ship.  Without an inch of my ass moving out of the plastic chair inside my room, I can reach the beautiful beaches of the Bahamas or the pristine waterfalls of Tanzania in a few seconds or so, depending on the strength of my wi-fi connection. I can even travel to outer space. While we cannot see what the light in another part of the world may allow us to see there, the images of foreign lands and peoples can simply be just a click away. We can also hear things as if we are really there: the sound of traffic, cackling laughters, cries for help, among many others.  Never had we held so much power right under our very fingertips.

And this has become so evident in the past few days. Like a travelling wave of light, with so much energy along its incessant and relentless propagations, news about the then-city, now-wasteland that is Metro Manila, hijacked cyberspace immediately after Ondoy’s wrath came and left like a loan shark demanding the monthly interest payment from his unfortunate victim. Pictures swarmed the electronic world and their copies multiplied like bacteria, sending concerned spines shivering all over the world. News of the worst metropolitan calamity in the Philippines in four decades, regardless of their reliability and accountability, spread like wildfire and filled up the headlines of every imaginable newspaper. And as the commander-circumnavigator of my own ship, I somehow reconnected with my identity and found ourselves steering and veering towards my desolate and grief-stricken country. Although in reality, I was stuck in another piece of land, which is a hell for any IB student, but which would undoubtedly be Nirvana for anyone who lost their homes to Ondoy. And, more sadly, all I could do was to watch the calamitous events like flashes of lightning, discomfortingly filling my heart with amazement, anxiety, and fear.

Such power I had, under my fingertips, to be able to see my countrymen covered in mud, traversing the torrential currents of rain and sewage. Such power to be able to witness homes being destroyed and washed away like children’s toys. Such power, to be able to witness the new generation Bayanihan, utilizing all forms of media to reach out for manpower and financial assistance. Newspapers. Radio. TV. Google. Facebook. Twitter. Such power indeed. Much more powerful than light, whose absence on that unfortunate Saturday left twelve million in complete darkness.

Ondoy’s wrath drowned the hearts of many with its relentless, continuous downpour of a month’s worth of rainfall in six hours, and left a multitude of hungry, naked, and homeless civilians. And while Manila was submerged in darkness, the Internet proved its increasing dominance in our lives. It became the fastest means of communication with the rest of the world. It’s accessibility, ease of use, simplicity, and unparalleled speed allowed us to know about the disaster within just a few clicks. Regardless of where the rest of the Filipinos were at that moment, they all gathered together as one force in cyberspace. Once information spread like virus, the consequential actions then came down to each computer user. Many Filipinos harnessed its power to further spread the news to help speed up financial assistance and increase volunteer numbers to make up for the government’s unsurpring failure to come up with preventive disaster measures, or at least coordinate its forces and allocate its resources (because there were no resources to allocate anyway, since the country’s Emergency Funds were diverted to sponsor the diablo’s international ventures such as this).

Well, everything all came down to me. I had the chance to use its power to - at the very least - help spread the news, in the hopes of getting more outside help. But instead, I simply sat down on my plastic chair, drowning myself in the comforts of my room while watching a submerging metropolitan of twelve million people desperately trying to make ends meet.