ADHD nation?

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

6/24/2013

Daily Tribune

The country has just gone through one of the worst roller-coasters of its stock market, along with a half-day's rain that produced one of the worst flash floods along the main avenues of its premier metropolis that had commuters and drivers pulling their hair. But, in a snap — as if nothing happened — almost the entire nation turned to television and spent several days rapt in the US basketball match-up between the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs. Is the Filipino nation just that easily distracted or is this symptomatic of a wider, national ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?

Such scatter-brained response is not mere occasional occurrence; it's a weekly, daily, even hourly, jumpiness in focus and activity — one moment hysterical over one crisis or another and the next laughing or crying with the latest sports, celebrity, or disaster spectacle — which must be one reason why this nation is going nowhere at all in solving its problems.

It was late last week that I first noticed this mania for the Heat vs Spurs. My sons were grabbing the remote from me, switching to the games, while I struggled to follow the latest developments in Syria and the Bernanke "tapering" of QE (quantitative easing) that has caused near Armageddon in the local and regional markets. This last one was really serious for some sectors of the economy as the Philippine Stock Exchange index lost at least P420 billion over the past weeks. Syria, and the US decision to arm the Free Syrian Army and its terrorist allies today, is like Poland in 1939 when Hitler invaded it — the event which many historians trace the beginnings of the Second World War to.

If these developments may be too far from the realities of Filipinos, let's look at issues closer to home, such as the triple whammy announcement of hikes in power, water, and Metro Rail Transit/Light Rail Transit fares. These threatened rate hikes are only the latest in a decade of increases, in the face of shrinking real values of the peso and people's wages and earnings, and one of the root causes of dwindling industries and the commensurately worsening unemployment and underemployment situation. We've been tracking these issues that are crying out for the people's attention, action and solution; but it's impossible to make them focus on these beyond a few days' stretch.

If it were only the tier of society that my sons count themselves in, i.e. the generation Y crowd of the middle to upper-middle class, maybe we don't have so much to worry about; but in the middle of last week when I sat around a table of pre-War and Baby Boomer generation folks, the discussion was also about the same games and who was betting on which team. When I made the point that the NBA (National Basketball Association) is an unnecessary distraction for a poor nation that's getting poorer, the septuagenarian became even more emphatic in analyzing the moves of the Heat's star player LeBron James. I was outnumbered all to one.

Late last week one mainstream newspaper, allegedly the largest in circulation, headlined on its Internet edition the sex scandal allegations surrounding Philippine embassies in the Middle East in the so-called "sex for fly" deal. But right below, it was the "James Yap posts Instagram photo with rumored girlfriend" bit. Is this to be the next frenzied focus of the Filipino people next, along with the probable dalliances of Mr. Yap's controversial ex?

I remembered then, just before I noticed the seemingly ADHD symptoms on the Filipino nation jumping about on the NBA games, the newspapers and mainstream media in general had also been headlining the seesawing games in the series. Now we know what the trigger for the ADHD symptoms of the Filipino national psyche is — the headlines of the mainstream media that broadcast media mindlessly repeat and re-echo from morning until night.

I raised this matter with my two NBA fixated sons and pounded on them that these distractions mainstream media are always triggering are not healthy for the country. My journalist son retorted, "Haven't you thought that the reason the Filipino is so easily distracted is that he wants to forget those problems?"
If that is how we as a people deal with life's difficulties, then we'll never ever get to solve anything. Clearly, that is where the Filipino people are at. Sad but true.

(Tune in to 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Destiny Cable Channel 8, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on "MRT, power, water rate hikes again"; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0923-4095739)