Too many holidays, so many complaints: Are we such weaklings?

The idea being floated in Malacañang about the President declaring a one-week holiday this Christmas is insane. This absurd scheme will put an official stamp on absenteeism and laziness, at a crucial time when our nation needs to work, not indulge in partying and leisure.

There is a great deal of pontificating in Palace quarters that a one-week hiatus will constitute millions of pesos in "savings" in the form of the foregone use of electricity and other public utilities. This is nonsense. Wherever holidaymakers and pleasure-seekers may go, they’ll still need electricity. There’s no such thing as a vacation with vacationers fumbling around in the dark.

What the government may be calculating is that it will save on the expense of powering and air-conditioning some of its buildings. This is a false premise. The awful truth is that a weeklong holiday at the end of the year will destroy our economy.

Businesses, already faltering and strapped for cash, will be forced to pay essential personnel extra pay to stay on the job, with these sums amounting to more than double the weekly wage.

The situation is horrible enough as it is. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that many firms will be closing down, or declaring bankruptcy after the Christmas season. Desperate employers are maintaining their rosters, as it is, in order not to dampen the Christmas cheer of their soon-to-be-separated employees and workers.

Why should we be so different from the rest of the world, or more blessed by the god of employment? In New York City alone, more than 300,000 jobs were lost in the wake of the September 11 disasters. There will be millions of jobs lost in the "rich" United States in the weeks to come. All over the globe, powerful corporations and big manufacturers, not to mention high-tech firms, have been laying off workers on the average of 10,000 to 15,000 jobs per company, or more. Even Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, is being swamped by a rising tide of unemployment and corporate failure.

And we’re planning more holidays? We must be living in a fools’ paradise.

The problem is that we can’t even go back to a coconut economy like the South Sea islanders. In the old days, the coconut was described as "the tree of life." It provided drink, food, copra, building material, and a lot of other ingredients. In the image of an idyllic islander existence, all people had to do was nap in the sun and wait for the coconuts to fall. Today, we don’t have many coconuts left. Our once-prosperous coconut industry, owing to years of neglect and government indifference, has gone to hell – the same hell to which our once-flourishing sugar production has gone. Decades ago we were one of the world’s biggest sugar exporters, vying with pre-Castro Cuba for a chunk of the US Sugar Quota.

These days, criminal syndicates even have to smuggle in tons of sugar (and rice) to fill our needs.

The Department of Tourism is even claiming that a one-week Christmas holiday will encourage domestic tourism. Whaat? If Filipinos have only a few pesos in their pockets, they’ll go to window-shopping the malls which have replaced our parks (since our parks are overrun with muggers and squatters), or else stay put in their hometowns. There’s a beach almost everywhere, close to home for that matter.

Worst of all, our officials who sponsor the one-week "happy happy" must have lost touch with reality. The end of the year is always budget and accounting time, with all accounts having to be squared and budgets toted up. Who’ll do these things if everyone is out on a lark?

What we need is hard work. Otherwise, in the end, there will be no work left for our wage-earners to do. In hard times, there is no substitute for perspiration. Coupled, of course, with faith.

* * *

In the past week, the public has been regaled with an acrimonious "word war" between Sandiganbayan Presiding Justice Francis Garchitorena and Ombudsman Aniano Desierto. The "war" was apparently triggered by a lecture delivered by Garchitorena over what seemed to him as a lack of preparation on the part of government prosecutors handling the perjury case against former President Joseph Estrada.

As is his wont, Garchitorena minced no words in exhibiting his displeasure. He remarked: "We’ve got to do things by the book and by the number. We got to do it right if we are going to send a man to jail . . . if we are going to deprive a man of his liberty, of his life, his property. It’s got to be done right."

Although, admittedly, I don’t have enough knowledge of the case on hand to determine whether government prosecutors really appeared unprepared or ill-prepared in pushing the government’s plunder case against the former President, I’m inclined to agree with Garchitorena, judging by the past cases in which government prosecutors led by their supreme Ombudsman "Ani" Desierto have been appearing in the Sandiganbayan "galloping and coming out all very glamorous."

It is a sad trend in our country that government prosecutors seem to present their cases more to the media than before the court itself. Cases must be tried in their proper tribunals, not in the media. But that’s what has been happening in more than one sector.

A ranking subordinate of Ombudsman Desierto confided to people that if his "boss" does not hear his own voice over the radio or his handsome face on television at least once a day, he gets sick. This is probably an exaggeration, but you get the point.

* * *

I’ve known Francis and his Quezonian temper for years, but never has he been embattled as he is today. After the Garchitorena versus Desierto exchange of barbs, another Sandiganbayan Justice – Justice Anacleto Badoy, chairman of the Third Division – is making headlines by alleging that Garchitorena, his immediate superior, tried to put pressure on him and told him to quit. Garchitorena has flatly denied this. So, there you are.

What makes Badoy a newsmaker is the fact that he is the one trying the plunder case against Estrada. Yet, Garchitorena has always been a straight-shooter, even though he has the deplorable habit of letting his mouth run away with him, often from fits of indignation or impatience. He couldn’t be so dumb as to tell Badoy to resign outright, even with his hair-trigger temperament.

What bothers me is the spectacle of two Justices of the Sandiganbayan hurling invectives at each other like fishwives in the wet market. The Spaniards left us an expression which always makes foreign audiences (unless Hispanic and Latin American) laugh whenever it’s invoked: "You don’t wash your dirty linen in public." Alas, that’s exactly what the two are doing, and over what is certainly the most celebrated criminal case to be tried in this country.

The problem is further exacerbated by the self-righteous militants of civil society, such as some members of a group styling themselves "Plunder Watch", who have added their grating voices to the already annoying situation. These kibitzers want to impose their own thinking on the plunder cases at bar and have already pronounced their own verdict – namely that Estrada et al. are guilty. This is a nation poisoned, sad to say, by too many polemics and too much dakdak.

For instance, one lawyer with "Plunder Watch" has been noisily speculating that the members of the Supreme Court are "divided" on the issue of whether the law is constitutional or unconstitutional, with the possibility that the law may be declared "unconstitutional" by a slim majority.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is as of this writing, the fourteen members of the High Court have not even voted on the case. That the members of the Court will not be unanimous in arriving at their decision is to be expected. Twelve men and two women, learned in law and jurisprudence, with different judicial philosophies, cannot be expected to look at the same law with unanimity.

We can only recall the cynical but humorous jibe of the philosopher Compoamor: "In this treacherous world, nothing is true or false. All depends on the color of the glasses through which one is looking."

Whatever may be the High Court’s ruling on the Plunder Law, the public may well be assured that the vote of each justice is based on each Justice’s study of the law and studied conviction, whether or not we may agree with them.