Blow your nose, not your horn

Floro and I are sitting at the lobby of Torre Lorenzo, just outside Starbucks, on the corner of Taft Avenue and Vito Cruz St., sipping heavy black espressos after a quick lunch at Mang Inasal across the street.

I was reading the New York Times, while Floro, true to form when his mind is idle, was ogling at a girl on another table who is absorbed with her Blackberry. It was last Saturday, the morning after a deluge of rain washed the dirt off Manila’s chaotic streets and also rendered them non-passable.

Many would remember that first Friday of November 2010 for the monstrous traffic that lasted well after midnight; turned most the city into a vast parking lot; and bloated some kidneys because commuters weren’t able to take a leak inside their immobile vehicles.

Ah, the traffic. I am sure many that night missed dates and appointments because of it. I myself came late to a hot dinner—courtesy of the wife who bought it in celebration of her mother’s birthday. When I got to the dinner, the soup has turned cold as the Aquino presidency’s treatment of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the ex-Malacanang tenant. The traffic was the culprit.

If Friday night was fright night because of the traffic, Saturday morning was easy and bright. Floro agreed it was a good time to drown our lungs in coffee and cigarette smoke and that Starbucks was a fashionable place to do it. I was delighted.

It was also a great day to kill a few drivers. From where we sat, I could see many of them—taxi drivers, bus drivers, car owners, and padyak drivers snaking their way through Taft Avenue like they’re racing for the toilet because of upset stomachs. But this isn’t the reason for my murderous rage. The reason I want to poison them with their vehicles’ exhaust fumes was because they were honking their horns too loud that I thought I had my eardrums busted that morning.

“They don’t do that in Bangkok,” I remarked to Floro without taking my eyes off from what I was reading.

“What, Sir?” he replied, not also taking his eyes off his coffee.

“These drivers blowing their horns too loud and non-stop,” I said, my blood curdling.

Floro now noticed it. “The ceiling is too low here that’s why a mild blow of the horn echoes so loud,” he said, seeming to justify the noise.

“What? I can’t hear you,” I said because another loud honking punctured the air. He just smiled.

Well, most Filipino drivers are like that. They want to own the road. They think the government owes them respect because they know how to drive. They are always in a hurry to overtake. They don’t stay in one lane. They are impatient to get to their destination. And to get ahead, they honk their horns, either to warn the drivers of the vehicles ahead of them to give way, or to threaten them that they will bump their rears if they don’t. They can’t get their hands off their horns. They don’t know the word discipline. Or politeness.

This is why I disagree with what the notoriously famous presidential speech writer, Mai Mislang, tweeted that Vietnam streets are places easier to die because she, I think, doesn’t have enough experience being a public commuter.

Manila’s streets are murderous, made more so by illiterate drivers who do not have any idea that noise pollution kills as much as cigarette smoke.

Well, at least cigarette smoke is quiet, that’s why I prefer its slow motion rampage than the temperament of drivers high on diesel or gasoline exhaustion and—sorry to say this—on their contempt for commuters and fellow drivers.

In other countries, drivers obey traffic laws. In the Philippines, drivers obey their tribal instincts. Blowing horns even at a minutest excuse is tribal instinct. The Filipino driver’s demonic inclination to blow his horn is symptomatic of his mental affinity to dogs. A dog smells a fresh bone a mile away and it raises a howl and race through like bullet. A Filipino driver, particularly that of a bus or a jeepney, sees a shadow of a passenger lurking a few meters ahead and he hurls his vehicle regardless of a red signal or another vehicle in front.

Many a pedestrian have met their Maker early because of vehicular accidents caused by uncaring drivers. Still many have lost limbs because an insane driver had beaten a red light or carelessly overtook another vehicle without signal for a warning. Worse, in this country, drivers who are involved in accidents are not jailed. If it was a jeepney they were driving when the accident happened, they are promoted to become bus, or truck, drivers. I think such drivers should be tied to a post of the LRT and bumped on purpose.

Why are there so many insane drivers in the Philippines? Ask the Land Transportation Office, whose corrupt officials and employees I think father our drivers. Shouldn’t we diminish our driver population by castrating their fathers?

Floro agreed with me when I verbalized this thought. To drive home his point, he said he has a better idea. That morning, he suggested that I shoot a couple of jeepney and bus drivers on the corner of Taft Avenue. I looked again at those drivers. Most were red-eyed because I think they were stalled in traffic the night before. They are all blowing their horns simultaneously for a reason I only found out when I stood up and finished my coffee: the traffic light on the corner was busted.

It was fortunate I didn’t have a rifle that day.