Maybe what we should do is control those anti-flood projects.

So many of them, and still floods remain fashionable, unbeatable, unbearable but profitable for some. As DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon puts it, they’re like some kind of mythical monster, where the more of them you slay the more of them come back to life. Watching our lawmakers talk about the anomaly is like following a horror movie where you expect more monsters the more of them you slaughter.

And yet this miracle is nothing new! From the exposes coming out on TV, and listening to Senator Ping Lac-son, we learn we were too innocent to realize how we were being fried in our own oil, with contractors getting paid over and over again for the same project by the same government office, or for the same project but under another name, or one and the same contractor using a different corporate name.

Such ingenuity... Truly, the Philippine economy deserves to be promoted to “upper middle income” status now, if only for that reason. For, if a contractor who has been in the business for less than a decade can make it to such heights as owning nine companies and at least 28 high-end vehicles, why shouldn’t we demand a higher economic ranking for the country? Who said we are poor, a third world economy where millions cannot afford three meals a day?

Everyone and not just Senator Lacson and his colleagues are asking for an investigation into a flood of pro-jects that have come and gone, realizing or refusing to realize that just like a flood that eventually subsides, flood control projects, real and imagined, come and go. (Does their longevity depend on the conjuring contrac-tor?) We’ll never know how funny this gets until we get over how the last DPWH secretary put one over on us when he resigned before a freshman taking a test in current events could spell his name.

Still, it is relevant and necessary to ask the resigned official to help Secretary Vince Dizon in ferreting out answers to the great mystery of why floods persist despite flood control projects that cost billions in taxpayer pesos.

We learn from experience that we never learn from experience. – George Bernard Shaw