The term is a Latin phrase in the first-person plural subjunctive, meaning literally “that we do not forget” or “lest we forget,
In the Philippines, calamity is not rare — it is routine. Floods in Davao, Bulacan, and Manila remind us that water can swallow homes and lives in a single night. The shooting incident in Tacloban, where innocence was stolen by violence, should have been a wake-up call. Yet, as days pass, these tragedies fade into silence. They are replaced by the noise of politics, the winding down of outrage, and the sweeping aside of issues that once demanded urgent attention. The cycle repeats: disaster, grief, outrage, forgetting.
To not take tragedy seriously is to invite its return. Floods are not just acts of nature; they are amplified by poor planning, clogged waterways, and neglected infrastructure. Each time Manila drowns, each time Bulacan’s rivers overflow, each time Davao’s streets turn into seas, we are reminded of what we failed to prepare for. Yet, instead of long-term solutions, we settle for relief goods and photo opportunities. The shooting in Tacloban, too, becomes a headline for a week, then disappears into the archives. Without serious reflection, violence becomes normalized, corruption tolerated, and catastrophe expected.
How long can a dreadful thing linger and how soon can it be forgotten?
Philippine politics thrives on short memory. Leaders rush to the scene of disaster, promise reforms, and then move on when the cameras leave. Floods are blamed on “nature,” shootings on “isolated incidents,” corruption on “the system.” The public, weary and distracted, accepts this forgetting as part of survival. But forgetting is not neutral — it is complicity. It allows the same mistakes to be repeated, the same tragedies to reoccur, the same wounds to remain unhealed.
Now that Floods are hitting Mindanao and the National Capital Region, the logical reaction is that floods exposed the corruption, the misdeeds of the leaders. After, the flood subsides, people live their lives forgetting the misfortune of the tragedy. Then, the flood until its return is a faded memory.
The Philippines cannot afford the luxury of forgetting. Floods will come again, storms will strike again, violence will erupt again — unless we take tragedy seriously. To remember is to prepare, to demand, to act. To forget is to surrender. In the end, the choice is ours: will we continue to sweep aside our misfortunes, or will we finally learn from them?.
