‘Life was like a pressure cooker’

By Jun Velasco

“What we have done will not be lost to eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.” – Ashok’s file.

WEDNESDAY night, former PNP chief Art Lomibao was at his best as a public speaker.

Honored by Rotarians at District 3780 and his home club of Metro Cubao in this post PNP chief era,  he  looked pinkish,  that is to say, the lines on his forehead and wrinkles on his face were gone.

It was this writer who recruited Art to Metro Cubao, together with General Pol Bataoil of  the Northern Police District, who failed to make it  Wednesday because several parts of Camanava were under water due to the nonstop rains. He beamed when he said “I did my best in my work.”  Most Pangasinenses and that Rotary chapter which predicted his ascent to the PNP post two weeks before PGMA named him had prayed hard for his success in all of his l6 months at the helm of the country’s largest government agency.

“I am now Citizen Art,” he said. “The first thing I did ( c. post  PNP chief)  was I went to Pangasinan  to sleep …  I used to have  three to four hours of sleep … now I  want to wake up at 8  a.m. go back to my driving range and resume my jogging at  UP. I went to Pangasinan to re-connect with my roots.”

In the intro, we said “probably it’s time Art picked up the pieces of his love life” (the missus has gone to the Great Beyond).

Art said the President or the Speaker hasn’t offered him any government post “but it’s good because I want to rest. The rumor mill though stubbornly keeps grinding NBI director, DOTC secretary, Customs commissioner. No doubt, Art did a good job amidst a grim environment, a fact that Regional Director Freddie de Vera is very proud of.   Someone sitting at the back shouted, “Pangasinan governor!”  The witty speaker snapped, “maybe Rotary governor!”  District Gov. Dan Espinoza was present and shouted, “Approved!”  Dan, when it was his turn to speak, elaborated his vote, and things began instantly giving way to Art in Rotary leadership.

How was it at the helm?  “By golly, life was like a pressure cooker,” he answered, now with a sigh.

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 If  you compare  the  rift  between  Taiwan  and  People’s  China on one hand,  and  that between  South and North Korea on the other,  you’d probably  find the latter tandem tougher, almost irreconcilable.

We have seen this thawing of the Taipei-Beijing iceberg right in Taiwan and in Beijing with most of the young Chinese tending to favor reunification.

In the two Koreas,  one has to deal with a confirmed mad man, President Kim Jong II who has lately terrorized  world peace by firing  seven nuclear missiles over Japan waters over the  vehement protests from South Korea (of course), US, Japan, Russia and other  countries including the Philippines.     

Other major countries  devil boy   Kim Jong caught by  surprise include  formidable China  and India who were all pushed to the security, economic and the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty  discussion table (minus Iran and N. Korea who signed but cheated the NPT). Kim Jong’s hot head behavior, figuratively and literally, is driving the world to the edge of a full scale world war; let’s hope sober world leaders splash cold water on Jong’s head for the sake of peace.  We gathered that even North Koreans are also nervous over his despotic and devilish ways.    

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Boy Rayos of the University of Pangasinan queried why the coup plotters and political opposition is no match to present dispensation. We said “wala naman e,” meaning, they are not in the real sense of the word a real, true opposition force.

With the CBCP distancing from the impeachment of President Arroyo whose popularity is lately improving, the opposition is dashed.

Maybe, we should share these words from our favorite writer, French Nobel Laurueate Albert Camus, who in an essay defines The Rebel, thus:

“A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is  also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying ‘no’?

He means, for example, that ‘this has been going on too long’, ‘up to this point yes, beyond it no’, ‘you are going too far’, or, again, ‘there is a limit beyond which you shall not go’. In other words, his ‘no’ affirms the existence of a borderline. He demonstrates, with obstinacy, that there is something in him which is ‘worthwhile…’ ‘and which must be taken into consideration. In a certain way, he confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate.”

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