Understanding us

HARD as we try to understand the psyche of our people, why we easily rise to defend and rally to the cause of people we hardly know, and yet be indifferent to the same cause that affect people we know about, we can’t fully fathom us.

We refer to the cases of our OFWs abroad in distress and the same situations that we experience in our communities daily.

While we do not deny that OFW Mary Jane Veloso, a victim of perceived injustice in a foreign land, deserved everyone’s prayers, we don’t understand why we cannot be just as passionate in fighting the proliferation of illegal drugs that victimize hundreds in our towns daily.

The drug lords who will never be executed here, are killing more Filipinos every day right in our midst whose only crime was to succumb to the lure of the illegal drugs. Yet we don’t cry for them. It’s no secret that drug syndicates are operating in our towns and cities with impunity, breaking up thousands of families every day where they can. Yet we just shrug our shoulders.

Why aren’t we angry enough because the government and the police are not doing enough to protect us, our family members from the clutches of drug lords and syndicates? Why aren’t we mad at judges and prosecutors who are protecting the illegal drug trade? Why are our barangay officials tolerating known pushers to move around freely?

Yet we were angry with the Indonesian government early on because it refused to be lenient in the case of Mary Jane until PNoy passed on the info that MJ’s recruiter has surrendered? Why?

We feel for Mary Jane because she is a victim in a foreign land but shouldn’t we feel more for the thousands of parents in our communities whose children are slowly dying because of drug addiction?

We can’t understand why we don’t care enough for our victims right here in our own communities. Do you? What can you do about it? What can we do together?

 

 

Fight of The Century

THAT we see Manny Pacquiao as a major player in today’s Fight of The Century is something more than surreal.  Maybe, we will never have a Filipino grabbing that once-in-a-lifetime role again.  It is in that framework that we should capture the impact of Pacquiao’s clash with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Las Vegas.  Who could have thought that a Filipino would be in the richest fight in boxing history, grossing an estimated $500 million?  That distinction alone is more than enough to establish Pacquiao’s safe niche in Philippine lore.

With Pacquiao, forced to skip meals as a toddler due to poverty, netting easily a dizzyingly crazy $120 million in earnings in this fight, pray tell us, who doesn’t want his son to be a boxer, too?

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