It was our privilege to bear the burden of Super Typhoon Yolanda.

At least that’s what “dudesk001” wrote in a heartfelt comment on CNN’s article about the storm. The comment has been liked by over 3,000 people and was turned into a somber photo that went viral the day after Yolanda made landfall.

The quote, in part, reads as follows: “At the end of the day the Filipinos will just shake off the dirt from their clothes and go about their business… and SMILE. They do not complain much, they will bear as long as they can. Maybe this is why they were given the ‘privilege’ of bearing the burden of the strongest typhoon ever recorded.”

The quick dissemination of the comment was spurred on by two strongly opposing points of view. On the one hand, there were those who took it to be an uplifting message, something to boost their rain-drenched spirits. No doubt they thought it equivalent to the popular expression that crops up whenever we’re caught in the throes of yet another typhoon: “The Filipino spirit is waterproof.”

I count myself among those of the other camp, who felt that there was something inherently inappropriate about the message being put forward. To call the strongest storm in recorded history to make landfall a “privilege” because we know how to grin and bear it is an incomprehensibly ridiculous way to view the situation—even if privilege is wrapped in defensive quotation marks. As a friend of mine put it, it is akin to telling a rape victim that their traumatic experience is a good character-builder.

But what was truly shocking to me was not what dudesk001 had to say, as I’m sure he wrote it only with the purest of intentions; rather, it was the enthusiasm with which so many Filipinos embraced the message, the way it was eagerly tagged as “heartwarming” and “inspiring.” That, in my opinion, is sound proof of how warped our understanding of resilience has come to be.

“Resilient” is a word that gets thrown around a lot whenever we’re hit by one disastrous event or another. It seems that it’s a quality now understood to be the ability to take everything in stride, to take a beating and, when the worst of it is over, stand up and say we’re fine. Technically speaking, those are, in fact, manifestations of resilience. But when taken alone and paired with the notion that being the bearer of a burden is a “privilege,” the meaning of the word becomes perverted.

It is no longer enough to pride ourselves in our unwavering capacity to smile after every calamity. Perhaps at this point, with storms the likes of Milenyo, Ondoy and Pepeng seemingly increasing in strength and frequency, we should be angered by the shortsightedness of our “disaster, relief, disaster, relief” conduct. Filipinos have seen enough catastrophe in recent history to be able to acknowledge that this a vicious cycle that ought to disturb us by now. The goal should no longer be to just alleviate, but to avoid.

It’s high time time we redefine resilience as not only the ability to smile after every disaster, but to learn from them and snap back into shape by getting two steps ahead.

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