The emperor’s new ‘crisis communications’

ATTACKING local media with your “crisis comms,” composed of supposed ideologues of media past, is not how you tackle the questions of Kagay-anons.

It is, to put it mildly, a strategic and tactical error of the highest order.

Questions of accountability, transparency, and governance are not mosquitoes to be swatted away by your brigade of known spin doctors, paid hacks, and trolls; they are the bedrock of the office you hold. 

Threatening broadcasters to shut up because they are not cowing to the narrative you are selling is a tactic that belongs in a black-and-white newsreel from the 1970s, not in a modern, aspirational metropolis. 

This is not how a democratic city is supposed to function, nong.

You seem to be operating under the delusion that if you muzzle the weatherman, it will stop raining. 

But the rain — and the traffic — remains.

Let us speak of the traffic woes of the city. 

While the City Engineer’s office proudly releases lists of “233 completed infrastructure projects,” the daily reality for the commuter suggests otherwise. 

We are told of P97 million allocated for flood control projects extending into 2026 to prevent another Sendong, yet the streets of the highway remain a parking lot at the slightest drizzle. 

The disconnect between the press release and the pavement is jarring. 

One has ample time to contemplate the existential void while idling near the stalled drainage projects that seem to serve as monuments to bureaucratic inertia rather than engineering solutions.

And then, the matter of the “Task Force Basura.”

It is a branding triumph, certainly — giving a military-sounding name to the basic parochial function of picking up trash. But why did it require a “Task Force” and an “ultimatum” to solve a problem that should never have existed? 

While the administration now trumpets the arrival of a new contractor to clear the backlog, the stench of the previous months lingers. It raises the question: if the system was working, why the sudden need for emergency measures?

You’re protesting the allegations with the vigor of a man trying to convince a mirror he is handsome.

“The gentleman doth protest too much,” Shakespeare might have noted. 

Lest we forget the water crisis that forced you to declare a State of Emergency earlier this year. When the dispute between the COWD and the bulk water supplier threatens to turn the taps dry, it is not an “act of God” or “force majeure” — it is a failure of foresight and contract management.

It is failed act of a micro-managing, overly-sensitive, political ignoramus.

Governance is not about winning the morning news cycle.

It is about ensuring the garbage truck arrives without a press conference, the traffic flows without a police escort, and a weekly social welfare service that doesn’t need to be named after you — an elected official.

You cannot PR your way out of a traffic jam. 

You cannot spin a pile of uncollected trash into gold. 

And you certainly cannot bully a city into believing that competence is present when the evidence of its absence is parked, unpaid, and uncollected, right outside their door.

Pfft.

Why Gen X was built for this modern dystopia

THERE is a prevailing, somewhat patronising narrative circulating in the ether of social media commentary. It suggests that Gen X — the “forgotten middle child” sandwiched between the sheer demographic weight of the Boomers and the cultural dominance of Millennials — has been blindsided by the volatility of the 2020s.

The argument posits that analog-native Gen Xers, now moving into their 50s, are bewildered by the erosion of institutions, the rise of digital surveillance, and the collapse of the “normal” world.

Please, disabuse yourselves of this notion. 

To suggest Gen X didn’t see these changes coming is to fundamentally misunderstand the curriculum on which we were raised. We are not bewildered. We are vindicated.

If anything, Gen X is the only demographic that has been waiting for this exact scenario since we were dropped off at the movie theater in 1985. We didn’t sleepwalk into this dystopia; we have the original scifi paperback copies of the user manual.

The hybrid advantage

The primary reason Gen X wasn’t caught off guard is technical. We possess a unique anthropological distinction: we are the last generation to have a fully analog childhood and the first to have a fully digital young adulthood.

We recall a world where information was scarce and had to be physically retrieved from a library, yet we were also the ones who laid the fibre optic cables, dialed into the first BBS boards, and built the early architecture of the internet. 

We do not view technology as “magic,” as some older generations might, nor do we view it as an innate extension of our limbs, as Gen Z might. We view it as a tool — and often, a weapon.

We were the beta testers for the digital age. We saw the promise of connectivity, but we also grew up reading William Gibson and watching WarGames. 

We knew from the start that the machine could turn on you. When algorithms began radicalising populations and privacy evaporated, Gen X didn't gasp in shock. 

We simply nodded and thought, "Yes, this is exactly what the cyberpunk novels warned us about."

Raised on dystopia

Culturally, narratives of inevitable progress did not coddle us. While the Boomers had the optimism of the post-war boom and Millennials were promised that higher education guaranteed success, Gen X was fed a steady diet of skepticism.

Look at our pop culture touchstones. RoboCop wasn't just an action movie; it was a satire on the privatisation of public services and corporate overreach. 

They Live was a treatise on subliminal consumerist control. The music of the early 90s — grunge, industrial, alternative — was steeped in a rejection of the mainstream and a deep distrust of “selling out.”

We were raised on the idea that the “system” was inherently corrupt, that corporations were not your friends, and that the shiny veneer of society was likely hiding something rotting underneath. 

Consequently, the current global crisis of trust in institutions — media, government, finance — feels less like a catastrophe and more like a confirmation of our baseline hypothesis.

The latchkey resilience

Then there is the sociological aspect. We were the “Latchkey Kids.” We came home to empty houses, cooked our own meals, and solved our own problems because the adults were busy. This instilled a feral kind of self-reliance that is paying dividends today.

In a modern era defined by the gig economy, remote work, and the breakdown of social safety nets, the Gen X mentality of “no one is coming to save you” is a survival mechanism. 

We are accustomed to figuring it out on the fly. We are comfortable with solitude. We are used to navigating chaos without a chaperone.

When the pandemic hit and the structures of daily life dissolved, the panic was real. But for many Gen Xers, the isolation and the need to improvise felt oddly familiar. It was just a Tuesday afternoon in 1988, writ large.

The cynical realists

The mistake pundits make is confusing Gen X’s silence for ignorance. 

We aren’t shouting on TikTok or writing manifestos on Facebook because we generally don’t believe that shouting changes much. We are the cynical realists in the room.

We watched the Challenger explode live on TV. We watched the Berlin Wall come down and then watched the “End of History” morph into new, endless conflicts. 

We saw the Dot-Com bubble burst. We know that stability is an illusion and that change is usually violent and disruptive.

So, when you see a Gen Xer observing the current AI revolution, the political polarization, or the climate crisis with a look of grim detachment, do not mistake it for confusion or ignorance.

It is the look of someone who read the warning label on the package forty years ago, while everyone else was just excited about the new toy and you were just in your daddy’s ball sac.

We knew this was coming. We’ve just been waiting for the rest of you to catch up.

Oh, if you’re wondering what the gibberish at the beginning of this article — that was the sound of success, the sound of connection to the future that we saw coming. 

A tale of two Uys

IN the political theater in this particular corner of Northern Mindanao, one surname looms large with an almost gravitational pull toward centralized authority: Uy. Specifically, we speak of two distinct, yet strangely mirrored, figures: Cagayan de Oro City Mayor Rolando ‘Klarex’ Uy and Misamis Oriental Governor Juliette T. Uy. They are not related by blood, but they are bound by a shared political DNA marked by a distinct brand of micromanagement and a fascination with control. The uncanny parallels begin with their respective bureaucracies. It’s a running gag — or perhaps a grim, perpetual reality — that government workers under both administrations have experienced the peculiar stress of delayed salaries. One might imagine this isn’t due to poor budgeting, but rather a final, meticulous check by the top, ensuring every single peso aligns perfectly with the executive vision. After all, if the Mayor or Governor hasn’t personally approved the decimal point, is the salary truly earned? This penchant for control extends effortlessly to the information highway. Both Uys have nurtured their own in-house “news media” outlets — a perfectly normal exercise, of course, for public servants who wish to ensure their good deeds are reported with maximum, unfiltered clarity. The city has its “Barkadahan,” and the province, the more formal “Capitol Press Corps.” It’s an efficient system: why bother with the messy objectivity of independent journalism when you can have a dedicated channel broadcasting the official narrative, complete with complimentary photo ops? Ultimately, the tale of the two Uys is a definitive study in control issues. From the specifics of delayed paychecks to the macro-level of media messaging, their shared approach suggests that governing is less about strategic delegation and more about being the sole conductor of the orchestra, the lead actor, and the script supervisor. One can only hope that, for the sake of efficient public service, their commitment to control doesn’t accidentally extend to controlling the release of the next batch of employee paychecks.