Not everything is for clout

Sometimes social media users are just angry, and rightly so

Few things have triggered me as much as the use of "pa-woke".

Often used to dismiss criticism of the government as being rooted in a mix of misguided idealism and bandwagoning on social issues, it is almost violent when used by government propagandists because it is often followed by hints that these "pa-wokes" are taking their cues from communist rebels who are apparently involved in everything now.

One propagandist who has recently expanded to Twitter, often outright calls government critics terrorists and, for variety, communist terrorists.

But red-tagging aside, I hate it because it is used to signal that public uproar over an issue is overblown and that the issue is only such to, aside from "pa-wokes", their cousins the "bleeding hearts" and "snowflakes".

One from this afternoon:

"Mga pa woke ang tanga tanga talaga. Pati paglagay ng white sands sa Manila Bay nirereklamo dahil daw covid ang priority. Tanga lang talaga???? Ano gusto niyo tigil ang mga proyekto ng gobyerno???? Tapos lahat ng taga DENR asikasuhin Covid at pumunta sa opspital??? INA NAMAN!"

Clearly, nobody expects employees from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to stand a shift at a hospital. That is not in their mandate.

What is in their actual mandate, though, is for them to "formulate, implement and supervise the implementation of the government’s policies, plans, and programs pertaining to the management, conservation, development, use and replenishment of the country's natural resources."

It is unclear whether their decision to dump crushed dolomite on a portion of the Manila Baywalk falls into that mandate since, as environmentalists have pointed out, it is a largely cosmetic solution and one that will require repeated dumping as waves wash away the fake white sand put there so poor people from Manila can experience Boracay.

Since the story was first reported, it has come out that provincial officials of Cebu — from where the dolomite was mined — were unaware of the project and that the DENR did not find it necessary to conduct a study into the environmental impact of dumping tons of crushed rock into an already fractured ecosystem.

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Environment Undersecretary Benny Antiporda, a former journalist and presumably currently an environmentalist, assures the public, though, that there will be no impact on the environment because dolomite is calcium magnesium carbonate and corals are made of calcium carbonate.

Beyond the environmental impact, it is also worth asking, as many on social media have, whether spending P389.8 million to make a portion of the baywalk look like Boracay and, as Antiporda explains, a way to make people aware of the need to keep Manila Bay clean is the best use of government funds during a pandemic. (Or even without a pandemic since the project was awarded in 2019.)

P389.8 million is probably a small sum as far as government spending goes, but could probably have gone to some other project. Like towards granting financial subsidies to those hit by the shuttering of businesses because of the pandemic.

President Rodrigo Duterte has often said the government no longer has money and the Palace has said that as well when it said Vice President Leni Robredo's suggestion of monthly subsidies to 10 million of the poorest families cannot be funded.

These objections to what is essentially a beautification project are not based on emotion or ideology, necessarily.

More likely, these are rooted in growing frustration from a population that has had to stay home and, for those who have the resources, online.

There are bad hot takes, of course, and social media sometimes explodes over the simplest things, but these are not representative of how many people online actually are.

We have been glued to our screens for months, falling into this and that internet rabbit hole and reading about all sorts of things.

It is probably safe to say that we are all a little more knowledgeable now about issues, or at least a little more than if we all still had to report to our offices.

And even the hot takes have value, I guess.

Given when only partial information is available, they are based more on core values and past experiences (and, okay, biases) and if your hot take is that maybe this is not the best way to spend P398.8 million at this time, that is not such a bad thing.

It is, at any rate, better by far than having the instinctive reaction of "these stupid wokes."