Greatest crime vs humanity

Many Filipinos are saying that President Benigno Aquino III can’t show any accomplishment after a year in office. I don’t think they are right. The President, I believe, is in pursuit of many of the greatest thieves of all time.

The biggest task of being the President is to see to it that there is enough food on the table of every Filipino, and if for this reason a poor man votes for him, that man has really done a magnificent choice. But we have to remember that the real job of the President is to ensure that when people exercise their choices in life, their choices must always be to their benefit and advantage. Unless the President fulfills his duty to protect the poor from the abuses of the powerful, the poor will never have three square meals a day.

Some say, and I quote, that “what really matters in life is not what you have but what you shared, not what you earned but what you built, not your success but what you have done with it, not your knowledge but your character.” But as Heraclitus says, “Character is destiny.”

We ask the President to do this and that, but no Filipino is asking himself what he himself has done about his own self. We ask the President to do something to reform our basic institutions, but we forget that reforming the institution means first and foremost reforming ourselves.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell argues that the idea of hell is no more than a doctrine of cruelty. I agree with him, but not for the reason that hell is some form of eternal damnation, which is a non sequitor if we believe in a loving God. I agree with Russell because unless we punish the root of all evil, there might not be any other way for the monsters of all corruption to pay for the greatest crime against all humanity—stealing from the poor.

—RYAN MABOLOC,

faculty,

Ateneo de Davao University, [email protected]