General Admission
The miracle
By Al S. Mendoza
WITH only a hint of wrongdoing incurred allegedly by a government official in many Asian countries, including notably South Korea and Japan, that official will resign. Promptly. Pronto.
Only very recently, the Prime Minister of South Korea has resigned.
Reason? He took the blame for a ferry that sank, killing nearly 300 – mostly high school students bound for an outing in an island frequented by tourists.
That wasn’t big news in Korea.
Over there, the official’s resignation was no big deal. Not even headline stuff. As ordinary as a policeman catching a jaywalker.
It wasn’t practically news at all.
The prime minister’s resignation was as common as combing one’s hair after taking a shower.
And look at this: The school principal, who survived the ferry tragedy, committed suicide.
Guilt-stricken. Conscience. That obviously pushed the prime minister and principal to do what they did.
If the tragedy happened here, will we see officials resigning, too?
No. So many ships have sunk here, killing thousands, and we have yet to see one official, government or not, resign.
Well, in fairness, there was one thus far who did the impossible, improbable: General Angelo Reyes, who committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart after he was linked to a bribe/bonus scheme while serving in the Cabinet of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Some three years after his death, many senators and congressmen, and a few Cabinet men in the Aquino administration, are now being linked to the P10-billion heist that robbed us blind through the siphoning of people’s money to their own pockets under bogus and non-existent deals allegedly masterminded by Janet Napoles.
Now being infamously ballyhooed as the scandal of the century, the scam threatened the very existence of the Senate as almost all of them have allegedly benefited from the P10-billion bust.
Likewise, many of our 200-plus congressmen have been implicated in at least three lists that allegedly contained the names of politicians and Cabinet officials linked to the anomaly.
Now, the question: Will we ever see even one them tendering a resignation?
At the rate the implicated politicians/P-Noy subalterns are reacting, expect a zero score.
They all have the same line of defense: “I never transacted with Napoles.”
Or, they chorus: “Please produce evidence that I stole people’s money.”
In short, they will defend their innocence though the heavens fall, so to speak.
But who said they were honorable in the first place?
Now, in case one or two will resign, how will you call that, how will you react?
Simply, that’d be a miracle.
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