A Letter to the Editor

Some thoughts on the rally: I had the most insightful conversation with a friend I had not seen in a long time earlier today at the rally. He told me that he’s happy that many students, teachers and administrators came to attend the rally, but he also expressed disappointment that many who attended the rally attended for the sake of attending. In other words, most of the people who attended the rally did not know anything about the PDAF.

His words reminded me of the countless number of people who could not stop taking selfies of themselves at the rally. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need them, but this world bows to numbers, and unfortunately, to get a million petitions, we will.

It’s ironic though that an uninformed and possibly apathetic mass is the solution to the pork barrel scandal’s root cause: an uninformed and possibly apathetic mass.

Personally though, I would appreciate a thousand informed votes rather than a million; but again, it’s a numbers game. Yet I find it interesting that the number of people who really care about the country is starting to grow. Today, I saw senior citizens, indigenous folk, students and yes, even the rich walking to fight against the pork barrel.

Before my friend left, he said, “Sila rin naman ganun din e.” (Referring to people who attended the rally.) In truth, he was referring to a specific set of persons, but I can’t really expound if you know what I mean.

What he said stuck to me even before I left. I started to think of motives for attending the rally. Some may have attended to wash their own hands (ie. ex CJ Corona) while some may have attended because they would probably be scrutinized if they did not. And the motive list goes on and on.

We must remember what we are fighting against. We are not fighting against Napoles and frankly, the portrayal of her as a pig really does not help. (It might even hurt the hog industry, which remains innocent from the pork barrel scandal.) We are fighting against a culture that promotes corruption in many forms, like not being accountable to your constituents, failure to treat people as stakeholders, making decisions that will not benefit everyone, and failing to uphold the truth when it is difficult. This applies to all, including universities, companies, families and the like.

August 26, 2013

Patrick Gale Ong

(VI, ECM-APC)