The cost of drama and distractions
I was at the Philippine General Hospital to visit a family member for the second time this year. As with my first visit, I liked the airy courtyards, the high-ceilinged hallways, the Jesuit-run chapel. There was, however, no public internet, and no button to call for urgent help from the nurses’ station. Parts of the hospital were dusty and messy. The wards overflowed with patients.
What struck me was the staff: everyone, from the doctors to the nurses to the orderlies, was generally good. I would see them in both the paying wings and in the wards, always on call and rushing, appearing hungry and sleepless, but still untiring. They were all professionals stuck in crumbling infrastructure, who weren’t paid well but still worked, and were holding up their professions and their hospital with the pillars of their sacrifice.
They deserve so much more than to be called “new heroes” without just compensation. The hospital deserves so much more than to be labeled a public hospital, and therefore not to be complained about.
Indeed, some might argue that the low cost of government facilities comes with a price. But that is to insult the dignity of those who can afford care only from a public institution. Would any one of us willingly tell a dying man that he was too poor to deserve comfort? Would any one of us willingly tell an impoverished mother that she was not entitled to urgent care for her sick child?
Our public hospitals are only a few among the many places that deserve to be upgraded—and that deserve taxpayer money without it going through the filters of the crooked. Investigation of the current corruption scandal should therefore be the venue to address this need.
What is derailing justice? The dubious testimony of the so-called 18 “ex-Marines.”
Last week’s Senate hearing had long been touted as the great revelation, except it came with a widely publicized power struggle and the Senate breaking into factions. That in itself should have made any bid at truth-telling appear suspect, but the hearings pushed through anyway.
There was drama aplenty: ex-majority bloc senators claiming that they were trying to turn the wheels of justice; ex-Marines saying that they had delivered millions of pesos to politicians, priests, even the International Criminal Court; die-hard supporters of the ex-president writing online about how the new Senate majority could not be trusted.
All this, despite the logistical nightmare of delivering an amount of money so staggering, it was way above the actual amount of pesos in circulation. All this, despite the inconsistencies among the affidavits, and the now-emerging allegations of people suddenly being accused of receiving suitcases because they had refused to endorse the impeachment of President Marcos.
And still, we wait for the true witnesses with the receipts and the credibility, with actual evidence instead of conflicting stories, with a paper trail rather than hearsay. We wait for the Senate drama to end because we have wasted time that should have been spent investigating corruption cases and the impeachment case. We wait for the actual work to begin, because we have wasted money that should have gone to senators who engage in the difficult task of investigation in aid of legislation.
We have been given a mess that veers attention away from the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, which has mounting, credible evidence. We are forced to swallow smokescreens that cloud a flood control scandal that threatens to reveal the truly corrupt. We are told to simply watch the drama unfold, to shrug at the contradictions, to accept that a Senate faction has its own definition of justice.
In the meantime, the rains have started, and our poorly built flood control mechanisms will not stand against them. Our roads need to be better so that they don’t have to be reworked and repaired every few years. Our hospitals and health care need to be affordable for all, not just for those who can pay or who were born into privilege.
And our Senate needs to get started on the impeachment hearings for the Vice President. It needs to work only with strong evidence for the flood control scandal. Anything other than this is political theater.
There’s this old phrase: tell it to the Marines, the shortened version of “tell it to the Marines because the sailors won’t believe you.” This came from seasoned sailors who looked down on the Marines because they didn’t have the sailors’ advanced knowledge of navigation, and were therefore thought to be naïve and gullible.
To tell it to the Marines is to also tell someone that they are misled, deceived, and should not be believed. We now have 18 ex-Marines, and we don’t know who to say the words to.
Perhaps we can have a new idiom. The Philippines is poor? We just have to live with flooding? We just have to accept traffic? We don’t have enough money to improve our hospitals? We just need to accept our fate?
Tell that to the ex-majority senators, because the taxpayers won’t believe you.
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