Since the pandemic forced me to work from home, I have rarely needed to take Metro Manila’s trains. This weekend, I did, and within minutes, I was reminded why this foolish country can feel so hopeless. Because nothing changed at all.
The train arrives. Passengers board. Then they plant themselves directly in front of the doors, as if the entire coach ends two feet behind them. They block people trying to enter. They obstruct those trying to leave. To think many of them will not even get off until the opposite end of the line.
The train operator repeatedly announces that passengers should move toward the center of the coach. Nobody listens. The doors open again, the same idiotic ritual repeats, and everybody acts surprised that boarding takes forever.
This is not merely bad train etiquette. It is civic failure in miniature.
Too many stupid Filipinos demand progress while refusing the smallest acts of discipline required to produce it. Move inward. Make room. Let people off before getting on. These are not complicated instructions. Yet even the simplest consideration for strangers is treated as an intolerable burden.
Call someone out and you may be met with anger, insults, or wounded pride; as though being corrected is a greater offense than inconveniencing an entire coach. If you are truly unlucky, you’ll even land in a hospital.
And then we wonder why the country is so easily abused.
This is exactly the public our oligarchs and political dynasties want: impatient, undisciplined, easily distracted, and permanently hostile to accountability. They loot the treasury, deliver inferior public services, wrap themselves in barongs, designer suits, and Catholic Church-approved respectability—and still receive applause from the very people they rob blind.
A population that cannot be bothered to move away from a train door will struggle to remove the parasites blocking the nation’s future.
Perhaps that is the ugliest lesson of the commute: the train is crowded, the country is stuck, and everyone insists on standing in the way.
If I were younger and moneyed, I would leave this miserable hellhole.
But like everyone else, I am still here—waiting for people to move.