The exact moment a reporter began screaming on the radio that shots were heard inside the Senate building, the power cut out in our subdivision in San Pedro City, Laguna.
Actually, that’s what woke me up from my early-night nap: when the electric fan suddenly died, leaving me in hot darkness inside my room.
While those with power (I’m talking about electricity here) were riveted to the unfolding drama inside the Senate, whole portions of Metro Manila and Laguna province were left in the dark, both literally and figuratively.
Fortunately, the power interruption lasted for only three hours, but honestly, in this hot weather, it was almost more than I could handle.
I was forced to go outside our house (something I’ve never really done when everything was “normal”), sit near our gate and watch the neighborhood go out in the same fashion.
Especially in today’s world when electronic gadgets have become an indelible part of our daily lives – which means that life seems to stop when our smartphones go low on batteries, especially if one doesn’t have a power bank or an auxiliary power source.
Fortunately, our barangay recently installed solar-powered lights along our street, and they became an instant magnet for our neighbors who suddenly had nothing to do except chat with each other.
Come to think of it, we’ve become so glued to our smartphones that “pangangapitbahay” seems to have gone out of style in the larger subdivisions – at least, until the power goes out.
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No, I am not trying to whitewash the negative impacts of these power interruptions to our economy and our lives in general.
In fact, I believe our government officials, particularly those in the Department of Energy (DOE), have a LOT to explain to residents who found their lives plunged into darkness, to say nothing of those working from home or on the night shift whose livelihoods were affected.
However, I do believe incidents like this probably should make us rethink about how our being “too connected” has, ironically, isolated us from our family, our friends, our neighbors, and the world in general.
We have been too riveted to the world we had created inside our screens that we tend to forget that there is a real world outside our smartphones.
I’ve always said it, but let me say it again: we have become so disconnected with the real world and have, consciously or unconsciously, created a “parallel world” that fits into our own views.
And sometimes, it takes incidents like brownouts to shatter the illusion of that “perfect world” we had created online and force us to see the real world, the physical world, and understand that there’s more to our lives than our online personas.
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