Viewpoints
Band-aid solutions
By +Oscar V. Cruz JCD
BAND-aids are little strips of tapes with a little gauge placed on little wounds hopefully to cause some cure. Needles to say, their key reality feature is “little”. It is little in size and coverage, little in scoop and finality. Band-aids wherefore are irrelevant and futile for big wounds with big bad implications and big ill consequences. In the day-to-day life of a people wrestling with so many and immense socio-economic problems, “Band-Aid Solutions” thereto are not simply vanity but downright inanity. Even elementary reason says that solutions should be at par with the nature and import of the problems crying for pursuant attention and action.
The Philippines is facing the national predicament of well regulated salaries and somehow regulated basic commodity prices vis-à-vis actually deregulated oil prices. The Filipinos find it harder to find work and/or employment but infallibly pay indirect taxes from birth to death. There are more and more hungry and desperate people in the country. There are wherefore more and more dissatisfaction and anger that make them march in the streets, hold rallies, show their dismay and shout their protests. There are wherefore understandably more and more spirited groups of citizens with different vision-missions but with one and the same cause, viz., alienation from the present national leadership and bedfellows.
Faced with such immense and intense national predicaments, the incumbent administration came up with “Band-Aid Solutions” in term of the so called “Conditional Cash Transfer”. Translation: On proviso that certain families meet certain conditions, a certain amount of money is periodically handed to them for certain months. The multi-million other poor families excluded from the scheme, never mind. Furthermore, the same administration thought of gimmick for those chosen groups of gasoline consumers, in terms of gas coupons or smart cards or whatever. Translation: On condition that these or those drivers are given the chips or something, they get discounts. And again, the multi-million of other gas consumers, never mind. Add hereto the fact that absolutely no one of the said chosen families and lucky drivers are exempted from paying their individual Value Added Tax. This can be anything but funny!
Recently, there are these or those TV programs censured for promoting mendicancy in the country. Reason: They freely hand out many cash prizes to the winners of many different game shows. Though unnoted and unsaid, Malacañang is now the biggest promoter of mendicancy in the country for its “Band-Aid Solutions”.
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