Netizem journalism

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

It is at once a happy phenomenon as well as a sad commentary on how things are done in the country, the way we have found civic use for social media. Happy and positive, because people are finding their voices and using their strengths as citizens to move things. Sad because, for heavens’ sake, how many of us  need to stand up, open a Facebook page, log on to it regularly just so they’ll keep the airconditioners at the airport running and the toilets clean?

These thoughts just crossed my mind as I scanned the FB page of people monitoring the state of the Bacolod Silay airport of international standards. From what I’ve read there recently, the toilets have been clean for sometime, largely, I guess, because of the dogged persistence of the people behind the page called by a rather long name, “Bacolod-Silay Airport…just our opinion.”

The state of cleanliness of the toilets is something of a benchmark on the state of that airport because that was  exactly what galvanized a group of intrepid citizens led  by one E Gonzaga Lumajen Azuelo, to take things into their hands and demand that  things be righted in that airport, beginning with the seemingly little detail of cleanliness.

There is also the matter of airconditioning. Joey Montalvo, one of the most active movers behind the page, has started a countdown to April 6, 2012, Good Friday, which is supposed to be the day when the airport’s full and efficient airconditioning system begins.

It is heartening to read how citizens are going out of their way for the public good, how people would no longer accept mediocre service. The comments on this particular page range from the way the attendants smell to the landscaping and beautification to security lapses, even what many perhaps will qualify as the simple matter of guards letting in their relations to the areas where others are banned. “Is that alright?” one asked.

Then there are the flies, hordes of them apparently, that, depending on where you’re coming from can be pesky, discomfiting and downright offensive. For most Pinoys, living as we do with flies in many of our public places, they may not really be something, but not to foreigners, who equate these flies with the worst forms of dirt, bacteria and unhygienic realities. And that airport is the major gateway for tourists coming to our province.

Interestingly, with the problem of toilets and airconditioning being addressed, the alert citizen now zeroes in on the flies. Of course as some of them have noted, their vigilance should not stop because that airport had started with clean toilets and simply deteriorated later.

Given such citizen vigilance, there is high hope that, that airport will be properly maintained, and hopefully, even improved in the days to come.

But how ironic that it must take something like this for that to happen. Going through the roster of members of the de facto airport watch FB group reads like the who’s who from the civic clubs and professional groups.

We could make full use of the time and energies of these people in more pressing concerns and perhaps problems bigger than unclean toilets and inefficient airport management. Is this how bad our country has gone? Where is the leadership of the country’s airports, by the way? That airport has been badly managed for a long time, until the FB page was mounted.

Of course we are blessed to have such a concerned private sector who will no longer take mediocrity from our supposed public servants. I can only imagine how it is in other airports where users are too timid or too shy to speak their minds.*

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