Blow to both press freedom and the people

By Al S. Mendoza

 

THE hardest hit in the recent killing of the ABS-CBN franchise renewal are the 11,000 or so employees of the TV network.

Anyone disputing that has a stone for a heart and deserves no place in a humane society.

Multiply the displaced workforce by five based on the normal average number of members of each family affected by the Congress-instigated closure of the media giant and you have no less than a whopping 55,000 mouths to feed.

That’s a lot.

It’s like a whole Class A town, not just a barangay, is going to be virtually erased from the face of the earth.

I can’t imagine a so-called representative of the people sending people he has sworn to serve to untold punishment, virtual perdition.

Were the 70 people’s representatives never stricken with guilt when they voted to kill the ABS-CBN franchise for good?

What they did was to actually not deny ABS CBN’s continued operation but to render the company’s hapless employees jobless, in the process unnecessarily subjecting their families to untold miseries—for how long nobody surely knows.

There are already close to eight million unemployed Filipinos as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

With the ABS-CBN closure, thousands more will join the ranks of our poor robbed of their livelihoods—not by their own choice but by the ruthless verdict of the very same people they supposedly voted to look after their welfare.

Amid the bleak prospects of our displaced labor force from the TV outfit, I commend the Magnificent 11 representatives who wanted ABS-CBN to continue  operating

One of them is our very own Christopher de Venecia, the congressman from our beloved city of Dagupan.

The youthful solon proved once more that he has the genes that truly represent the interests of the common tao, as was the lasting legacy of his highly respected and dignified father, Joe de Venecia, the former House Speaker himself.

Here’s one De Venecia kid in shining armor, proving that one does not need bundles of years, age, to unearth wisdom when choices between right and wrong swim unrelentingly in our mind.

While press freedom was equally blown to pieces by this cowardly act of the Sick 70, unimaginable is the social and economic destruction inflicted on 11,000 or so workers kicked out by the conscienceless congressmen.

The Lopezes, the ABS-CBN owners, are also hurting for sure, but, they wouldn’t be crawling in poverty and want as a result of this debacle.

The Lopezes are that rich they would hardly feel the pinch, the closure remotely making a dent on their wealth that could carry them to even 10 more lifetimes.

Bottom line here really is the untold suffering the displaced workers will have to face when they are removed beginning, said ABS-CBN management, next month.

For, at a time when the coronavirus pandemic severely stalks the land, the looming hunger could cover a wide swatch of devastation for our destitute brethren in the ABS-CBN wasteland.

May God forgive the Sick 70.  They knew not what they did, which was to transform themselves senselessly from pro people to angels of death.

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