Basic courtesy in backseat
If our brilliant legal minds feel that what President Aquino did was unpleasant and disrespectful, perhaps they should imagine the kind of Christmas a family that earns less than $2 a day will have. No, it is not a matter of choice that one is poor; opportunities simply do not exist for many. The President is using his moral powers in speaking on behalf of poor Filipinos who have become the nameless victims of the corrupt ways of the past regime.
While it may be disturbing, from the point of view of a constitutional democracy, to question the appointment of the Chief Justice in public, the experience is nothing compared to seeing thousands of homeless children in the streets. Brave men and women in the past fought for their rights and won not in the courts but in battlefields, the streets, and in the ever expanding imagination of brilliant and noble minds who consider the pursuit of equality to be the moral basis of our institutions.
As reasonable men we believe that those in positions of authority deserve basic courtesy, but that cannot be more urgent than correcting the wrongs of the past.
The Chief Justice has become the poster boy for the sins of the past. If he believes he deserves the position then he may stay in his post.
But given the choice of erecting a tower that will rise up into the heavens for people to worship and helping paint a smile on the face of a poor child, I will always choose the latter. A tower, no matter how tall, will never reach the heavens. But by doing what is right, you commit something that reverberates in the hearts of men, forever.
—CHRISTOPHER RYAN MABOLOC,
