Bad parent

I WAS going to write about how being a “tambay” before has actually added items to my skills set, marketable skills at that.

Like, I learned how to do fast arithmetic from a tambay who was a seasonal jeepney barker-fare collector. I learned how to do fabrication and ironworks from an unemployed neighbor whose wife bought him a welding machine. If you live in one of the houses in Scions Subdivision, chances are, we made those iron grills on your windows. I learned to hone my skills with the guitar by playing with the tambay almost every night during summer breaks. As author Sidney Sheldon wrote on Stranger in the Mirror: “How can you expect to draw in the champagne crowd if you can’t even win over the beer crowd?”

However, all that I’ve started to write went down the drain when it took back what it said about arresting the tambay late last week. It said in a gathering in Davao City, the alternative seat of government, it never ordered the National Police to arrest the tambay.

Now, it said the police should tell the “unruly” tambay to go home or be arrested. It even challenged its critics to rewind what it supposedly said. Apparently, it is devoid of the concept of “recording.” Of course, the people can and will go back to what it said. “Hulihin mo at ikulong ninyo. Tutal may PAO naman bukas magpa-release, eh di sige,” it said to the police.

Naturally, the approved-without-thinking coercive arm of the state went out and rounded up some 5,000 tambay. I’m reminded of the Gen. Fabian Ver joke of old. Strongman Marcos supposedly told Ver to jump off a building and Ver, without batting an eyelash, asked Marcos which floor to jump off from.

But the police, in this case, got the shorter end of the stick because it now appears that they acted on an order that wasn’t even issued in the first place. It did so, but only after the death of an “unruly” boy who was waiting for his phone credits be loaded without his shirt on.

I say there are far more malevolent people wearing barong and suits than people without shirts on their backs.

Lawyer Florin Hilbay is correct when he pointed out that the order to arrest the tambay (an order it said it never gave), empowers the police to arrest arbitrarily. Given the “sterling” human rights reputation of the police of this administration, the order is prone to harassment and extortion. The order will encourage profiling and violates the citizens’ rights to liberty, association, and free movement.

But wait. As I’ve written above, it has taken back what it said about arresting the tambay, it doubled down by saying that it can arrest anybody invoking the doctrine called parens patriae (father of the country.)

It even challenged its critics to contest the order it supposedly did not issue to the police before the Supreme Court. Yeah, right. Like we don’t know how the SC would rule after what it did to former Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno?

Going back to that “parens” doctrine it invoked, it only shows how lousy a parent it is to the country. It has favorite offspring. It has offspring that blatantly corrupt its administration yet recycles them by reappointing them to a different department.

Let’s not forget the security contracts its favorite son garnered while in public office; the P60 million its favorite trio have yet to return to the public coffers; the favorite drug cartel it has allegedly been protecting; the loans with prohibitive interest rates it borrowed from its adoptive foreign brother; and more importantly, the thousands of its sons and daughters it killed under the pretext of war against drugs.

I say if it insists on being the parent of this country, then it has committed the biggest filicide in the history of the world. What a bad parent. Pfft.

Political will and traffic woes

The Roads and Traffic Administration appears to have everything but administration. It must be the most inefficient and grossly incompetent department in city hall’s entire bureaucracy. A cursory drive around the streets of the inner city and its highways will bear me out on this claim.

Luxury SUVs are double-parked in already narrow streets. These “untouchable” vehicles, by the way, almost always sport a decal of Herr Führer’s fist bump salute. There is a ridiculous number of traffic lights which seem to be inversely proportional to the number of enforcers manning the intersections. Out along JR Borja Extension and highways, 18-wheeled trucks and even broken down heavy equipment line up as if these were their garages. Last but not the least are construction supply stores and other businesses encroaching the legally mandated one-meter easement as extensions for their warehouse or product display.

I am often baffled where the likes of Mayor Oscar Moreno and City Administrator Teodoro Sabuga-a pass through when going to city hall from their residences. Are the windshields of their cars heavily tinted that they can’t see what ordinary pedestrians and motorists see? I ask this because they seem to be content with the services rendered by the RTA’s guy on the ground.

Appointments to the city’s departments like the RTA need to be based on efficiency and competence. Princeton University’s WordNet database defines efficiency as the ratio of the output to the input of any system and the skillfulness in avoiding wasted time and effort. The same database defines competence as the quality of being well qualified physically and intellectually. You’ll be the judge, my dear readers.

A friend recently shared his observation of the traffic lights of the city to me, last week. He pointed out that intersections with traffic lights are more likely to have gridlocks than those that have no traffic lights. He specifically pointed out the four bottlenecks in Bulua and Kauswagan.

For my part, I find it boggling that traffic enforcers are quick to launch “karate operations” against ambulant vendors and even deploy towing trucks for the same when luxury SUVs and trucks obstruct roads and inner streets far wider than ambulant vendors. Mga kabus ra’y kaya, ser?

The two-lane barangay roads have become even narrower because of residents using it as their garage extensions. Worse are the “bays” for automotive repair shops. In Consolacion, dump trucks park overnight right beside the streets. Where are RTA’s towing trucks? Where are their clamps? I distinctively remember they had these when they sampled illegally parked cars in downtown Divisoria way back when they launched “Hapsay Dalan?”

I must have called the attention of authorities a gazillion times. Yes, the RTA visits and inspects the area but other than that, nothing actually happens. In the weeks that followed, the dump truck just stayed there. In fact, it is still here, as I write this column. We have even started calling it a “dumb truck” for the obstinance of its owner.

The pièce de résistance of this seeming double standard, for me, is one construction supply store in front of this paper’s office in Gusa. I have been told the owner of the store is a village chief in one of the city’s urban barangays. It is also public knowledge that he is closely associated with the city’s erstwhile kingpin. We have referred to this store owner as the “reclamation king” in jest. This is the very same person who single-handedly delayed a national civil works project: the coastal road.

Year in and year out, he has effectively “reclaimed” the highway as an extension of, not only parking space for delivery trucks, his warehouse. Just recently, he used the drainage of the highway as a storage area for his iron bars.

Oh, the area also serves as a parking space for his forklift, which conveniently wasn’t present when the RTA made a surprise inspection last month. But after that surprise inspection, pfft. (Cue in cricket sounds here.)

Mind you, people are not as naive as these powerful cretins might presume. People know how to connect the dots and cross the Ts when it comes to political will and considerations. Not until these cretins learn who they are supposed to be serving, the city’s traffic woes will continue to plague us pedestrians and motorists alike. Pfft.

Till the bitter end

NEWSPAPERS were an integral part of our mornings when I was growing up in Gusa. Mornings with my late father consisted of coffee, cigarettes, and newspapers. Yes, you read it correctly. Plural, as in, newspapers.

My father, Emilio, used to say that no one newspaper could cover the different nuances of each news beats. That’s why he always bought several newspapers. Each morning, he’d buy copies of Malaya, Manila Bulletin, Philippine Daily Inquirer (although, I think it was called differently then), and that other newspaper with Gat Lapu-lapu in the middle of its masthead.

Emilio told me each newspaper was good at telling a particular news. Like, one newspaper would be smashing with reporting on the current economics of the country while another would be woefully inept on it but great at reporting political dynamics. So, at the tender age of 11, Emilio had taught me how to spot a newspaper’s niche in the reporting world.

The reason why I have been babbling about newspapers is that a week ago, I heard a scary news. A subsidiary of a major newspaper has supposedly closed down. I said supposedly because it turned out that the regional newspaper is still up and running but its printing presses for Visayas and Mindanao have shut down. Still, a devastating news, depressing at that since I have been in the newsprint medium for the better part of my life.

However, truth be told, the newsprint medium isn’t the first and only news medium I’ve dabbled in. I used to work besides Emilio when he was the news director of GMA-TV 12, back when the franchise belonged to the Saragas. I was an eager high school student writing news articles for the news anchors to read. Only Emilio knew I was writing some news items. It was part of a writing exercise my father made me do. That’s why the news anchors Joyce Ann and even my own brother Enrique Luis didn’t know that some of the news they were reading were mine.

Not too long ago, I worked as the multimedia producers for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. I was in charge of the content of our institutional blog, made data visualizations, information graphics, and of course, investigative reports. Our products were mostly published online except for sometimes when major newspapers and TV networks would feature them in their respective platforms.

How could this be happening? The print medium is the oldest medium. It is at least hundreds of years old. It predates radio, TV, and now, the internet. I have read and heard of the “eventual death” of the print medium. I have been denying myself this fact because it’s too painful for me to even consider.

Last year, Tony Rogers wrote about the grim prospects of the newspaper industry. “For anyone interested in the news business, it’s hard to avoid the sense that newspapers are at death’s door. Every day brings more news of layoffs, bankruptcies, and closings in the print journalism industry.”

Here, Alfonso Pedroche, Philippine Press Institute chairman, writes: “The supply of newsprint runs short as the number of trees, from where a paper is derived dwindles fast. As a result, the cost of newsprint rises to an exorbitant proportion even as the prices of other wherewithals in newspaper or magazine production (such as ink) are turning almost prohibitive.”

Anybody who is in the newspaper business knows this to be true. That’s why most newspapers have their digital copies online nowadays. A friend told me last week that the written word is still king. It’s only the medium in which it is packaged is changing.

Call me sentimental but, for me, nothing beats the smell of ink on a freshly printed newspaper hot off the press. I love the sound the newspaper makes when you spread them with both hands to see better see the center spread. I love the choice of fonts each newspaper chooses. Don’t even get me started on the layouts. That’s where I started my newspaper career. I was a layout artist of one of the local daily newspapers in the city. That was when I met my mentors. That was when I met my current editor-in-chief. He used to be that newspaper’s city section editor.

So, the news that the newspaper industry is dying or stands to be taken over by online platforms is devastating to me.

But I take solace in Pedroche’s last sentence in his article titled “Is print media dying?”: “Though there are great hurdles along the way resulting from the vicissitudes of the modern times, print media shall continue struggling to survive.”

There is no doubt it is on its way out. That part I have now come to terms with. Call me a hopeless romantic but I’ve always had an affinity with the print medium. I know it is in trouble and it is dying out as a news platform. But I’m riding it out until its bitter end.

Gunpowder and treason

“You can fool some people some time but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” -Get up, Stand up, Bob Marley and the Wailers

JUST like other budding republics in the world, treachery and treacherous behavior have been ingrained in our history and polity.

Case in point, 119 years ago today, General Emilio Aguinaldo ordered the execution of General Antonio Luna in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija.

Luna was supposed to attend a war council at the behest of Aguinaldo. However, Aguinaldo was nowhere in sight except for the soldiers who were there who were ordered to arrest him at all cost. Only three years before this, Andres Bonifacio and his brother suffered the same fate at Naic.

A little digression and trivia, if you will. A year before he ordered the assassination of Luna, June 5, 1898, Aguinaldo issued a decree declaring June 12 as the day of the proclamation of independence. The 21-page declaration was signed by 98 Filipinos, all of whom were appointed by Aguinaldo, and one retired American artillery officer, for good measure.

I’m not a big history buff but it’s not every day that a pivotal point in our nation’s history falls on the same day your column gets published.

Politicos in power, no matter how they package themselves as “pro-people,” will always behave according to their original socio-economic standing. As we are witnessing today, this truism still holds true as it was 119 years ago.

Anybody who threatens the status quo will always end up dead.

Why’d you thought all those “drug lords” killed without the benefit of the courts and some were spared? If you still believe that all these killings were part of the grand scheme to eradicate drug use in the country, then you’re woefully mistaken.

Impunity, by the way, is not only characterized by wanton killings by people in power. This also manifests in day-to-day activities. The key phrase that defines impunity is that the perpetrator knows they can do it without being held accountable for the deed.

Of course, our republic is young and far from being ideal. But this recent couple of years have shown that we’ve stepped back, regressed to the time when the appearance of justice is with the barrel of a gun.

I used to take solace in thinking that treacherous people always have their day of reckoning. But reviewing this part of our history, as a republic, depresses me. Aguinaldo is still being revered as one of the nation’s heroes. Ironically, a hero along with the guys he betrayed –Bonifacio and Luna.

Today, some people insist that the martial law of strongman Ferdinand Marcos did the republic more good than bad. Worse, some people still think and believe we are now better off compared to the time of the “delawans” led by PNoy.

All they see as the result of Marcos’ martial law are the edifices built during that era. Unfortunately, they don’t see how it destroyed the democratic institutions of the republic. I guess that’s why we are committing the very same mistake today — the willful demolition of the independence of the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Commissions, and Congress.

As depressing the times are today, I still believe these people will have their day of reckoning. You can call me a hopeless romantic but I believe a critical mass will awaken and rise up to put an end to these latest dark days in our history.

Believe you me, they will have their day.