Where have all the flowers gone?
This is a familiar tune. According to Wikipedia.com, Peter Seeger wrote
the first three lines of the song in 1955. Joe Hickerson added the additional
verses in 1960. Later, the song “Where Have all the Flowers Gone” has earned
political undertones because of its indictment against wars.
The
flowers of the Visayas are gone. Strong winds and raging floods plucked them
from the Visayan soil. No longer could young girls pick them up. They are gone.
The good land that nourished them has become a desolate zombie land for those
who are left breathing after the storm. And with the flowers gone, graveyards
become a better sight than the open space which the tempest left behind.
Dead bodies are everywhere. Of
course, the dead cannot bury the dead and so, they all lay bare in the streets.
Breathing people walk but the paralysis that afflicted them is more than the rigor
mortis in the faces of those who have died. Thus, nobody cares anymore
to wash and bury their dead.
Statistics? The dead do not make them
as only the living could make the count. Observers hinted that there are more
than ten thousands while the government claimed that dead bodies are a couple
of thousand only. But if the count is only about a thousand or two, then, why
could not the government bury the dead with dispatch?
Young girls are missing. Make no
mistake about it. Small women who survived are not young girls—at least, not
anymore. Despair and hopelessness had robbed them of their innocence. They have
aged in days. They could no longer dream of flowers and fairy tales. They no
longer hope for fine boys to make them feel special. They could only think of
food and water and of the dead in their families.
There they are—hungry and
helpless—waiting for the sun to come and dry their tears. There they
are—breathing, yet so dead in hope and smile. In their minds, they see a world
that stands still in the middle of a void.
The typhoon has passed but the
tragedy continues.
Calamity seems nothing compared to
the blackness that ensued when the calm took over. Hopelessness is so pervasive
that the victims felt that living seems less preferable to extinction. Help is
so slow that people are driven to reckless despair and insanity. And authority
is so absent that people thought that everything is free for the taking.
Indeed, the days that followed proved
that people could weather any storm but not the incompetence of the officials
that rule over them. They suffer because of their doing. The typhoon may have
come from the remotest part of the world but the disaster that continues to
destroy people’s lives has risen up from their collective will. This is the
pestilence that kills the flower in the hearts of the young. This is the
disease that dissipates the hope in the minds of the hopefuls. This is the
disaster that people perpetrate despite of their power to end it. This is the
tragedy upon us all. When will we ever learn?
