Theres The Rub
Wrong message
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:03:00 08/05/2008
There were a couple of stories here last Saturday that drove home the point that those who can’t do preach. The first was Bayani Fernando warning the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) against touching his posters. “Unlike other billboards, they don’t pose danger to lives and property. They’re part of an intensified information and educational campaign of the MMDA to instill discipline among residents and restore order in the metropolis.” The DPWH, he said, should tear down instead the commercial billboards that flout the law.
What idiocy. The DPWH shouldn’t just touch his posters, they should touch him, preferable by mixing him in cement, and even more preferably not just metaphorically. More than the commercial ads, his posters are a threat to life and property, inviting as they do drivers to ram their vehicles into the offending posters. They are also a threat to health, his picture, like that of his boss, being enough to crowd hospitals with patients suddenly afflicted by hypertension and other diseases related to feelings of unbearable oppression.
At the very least, those posters subvert their professed intention. Discipline is the last thing they will encourage among the public—rioting is first. How can you instill discipline among the public when you yourself display cheekiness and irresponsibility beyond belief? Those posters were already an eyesore last year when Metro Manila residents could count whatever blessings in life they still had. They are an absolute abomination today when those same residents are reeling from the prices of rice and gas, the two most basic needs of an urban resident, that are rising faster than their leaders are falling. The fortune that went to making those posters could have been put to better use.
While at that, the fortune was harnessed only to fuel Fernando’s political ambitions. They are campaign posters, nothing more, nothing less. You know it, I know it, he knows it. The only comfort, a truly cold one, anyone may take from those posters is that they show the future voters exactly what would happen if they ever felt suicidal enough to put him in higher office. That is what he will do to their taxes.
I do know something that will assuredly instill discipline among the public. That is to throw Fernando in jail for a few years for illegal use of funds and campaigning well before the stipulated period. At the very least it would instill discipline in him. At the very most it would instill discipline in the rest of us by showing that lack of discipline, or plain abuse, won’t be tolerated in this country. It will be poetic justice as well: Finally Fernando will get a taste of what he has been giving undisciplined pedestrians to force them to keep to sidewalks. That is to fence him in.
The other story was the one about 13-year-old Rodney Berdin getting instant fame and fortune, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, from his introduction to the world through Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s State of the Nation Address. Berdin was the kid who saved his brother, sister and mother from drowning when their house in the village of Rumbang near San Jose, Antique, was swept by rampaging floodwaters at the height of Typhoon “Frank.” Rodney swam for them and rescued them one by one. For his exemplary action, he got mentioned in the State of the Nation Address and got a hero’s welcome when he came home.
I am happy for Rodney and his family. I am thrilled that they found it the most wondrous thing in the world that they set foot in Malacañang and got feted at the session hall of the House of Representatives. (Both belong to him and the other citizens of this country, not to those currently inhabiting them.) And I am elated that they now face a future, particularly with scholarships and livelihood opportunities flowing their way, less bleak than the one they did before Rodney did what he did.
But I am horrified that Rodney’s “discoverer” would want to bask in his glory, not to speak of suggesting he is a protégé of hers.
Rodney can never be Arroyo’s protégé for one simple reason: He is her superior, not her inferior. In every possible way. Rodney was the only class act in a roomful of crass acts, notwithstanding that he offered a pedestal for a government fallen so low to clamber up to. The poor have a right to do everything in their power to survive, if they have to claw their way through, if they have to beg, steal, or borrow their way through. The rich, and crooked, do not.
As with Fernando’s posters, Rodney refuted the message his presumed benefactor was trying to make, which was that she, or her government, was made of the same stuff as he. What Rodney did was a supreme act of altruism and self-sacrifice. Apparently, he had just learned to swim the year before, and though young and strong, he was by no means an expert swimmer. Yet he risked life and limb, having absolutely no thought for himself, throwing himself again and again to the swirling water to rescue his brother, sister and mother from a fate worse than poverty. That is not the stuff of which Aroyo and/or her government is made. Thinking of others first and themselves last is not their strongest suit. Rodney does not offer a comparison with them, he offers a contrast with them.
One of course can always say he never really made a choice at all, he just acted from pure instinct. His family was in danger, he had to do something. Indeed, the “had to,” which suggests compulsion, never even entered his head. He just dove blindly to come to the aid of his loved ones. But even if you put it that way, you still have to stand in awe before someone who possesses the instinct of not always putting himself first (and last). You still have to stand agape before someone who is driven unfailingly, unflaggingly, courageously, to act on it.
I know someone who doesn’t. I know someone who won’t.
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