Elephant problems, mouse-hunting solution

The two biggest problems facing our country can be compared to two rampaging elephants that are killing and incapacitating so many of our countrymen. And how is the government responding? It’s paying little attention to the elephants. Instead, it has gone hunting for a squeaky mouse.

The two elephants represent the COVID-19 virus and widespread hunger, both of which are causing unprecedented suffering among our people, while the squeaky mouse symbolizes the communist insurgency. A pair of problematic rhinoceroses is also tormenting our people. There’s the African swine fever that has killed millions of our pigs, driving food prices to skyrocketing levels and causing pork to disappear from many of our markets. And there are the powerful natural disasters that make an annual pilgrimage to our islands in increasing levels of destruction, depleting our crops and devastating large swaths of our communities.

So why on earth do we have a government that’s not concentrating all available resources to fight the confluence of humongous problems ravaging our country? Instead, it’s making a mountain out of the molehill that is the communist rebellion. Do we see the New People’s Army laying siege to a city or municipality, similar to what terrorists did to Marawi City? Do we hear of NPA rebels going berserk and slaughtering innocent civilians? We see none of these terrible events occurring.

Whatever recruitment schemes and influence-expanding machinations the communist movement had been doing, surely they’d been kept to a minimum if not completely halted by the pandemic. There are no students in schools and people are cocooned in their houses. How can communist rebels expand their activities to points more expansive than pre-pandemic levels, to justify the resurgence of war against them at this time?

While our country is in terribly short supply of funds, the administration has increased the budget for anti-insurgency tenfold, from P1.7 billion in 2020 to P19 billion this year. The government explains that this budget will be used to build farm-to-market roads, street lighting projects and the like in barangays that are cleared of communist rebels. These kinds of projects are also what’s favored by pork barrel-loving congresspersons. They are projects that stink to high heavens.

In the list of our nation’s needs at this time, do farm-to-market roads and street lighting rank with equal urgency and importance to vaccines, test kits, and relief assistance? Our country’s national debt increased by P2 trillion last year due to the “higher funding requirements” needed to respond to the coronavirus disease. But while we incurred trillions in debt, we still didn’t get to buy a single vaccine vial. We will surely need to incur more debt this year because of our requirement for vaccines, test kits, and continuing relief assistance.

How many people would be saved from life-and-death dangers to health if the P19 billion anti-insurgency fund were used instead to buy vaccines? How many people would be saved from starvation if the P19 billion fund were redirected to relief assistance?

Our government deserves denunciation for its twisted priorities. It deserves mistrust that it will use the anti-insurgency fund for electioneering purposes. It deserves suspicion that it’s using the war against communist rebels to divert attention from its mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. Above all, the government deserves condemnation for spilling blood under circumstances that amount to extrajudicial killings, and for its massacre of our civil liberties.

With the mounting number of casualties in both the war on drugs and in the war against insurgents, it’s as if the government is sending the deadly coronavirus this message: “No, you can’t steal our thunder!”

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