Expect no redemption from bad public servants

Even without Noynoy Aquino’s spin, we the people truly are “the bosses.” And position seekers are “public servants.” Servants are there to serve, not to loaf around and make excuses. Yet why is it our lot that our servers take us bosses for fools?

Start with Mamasapano where our 44 commandos were massacred Jan. 25. At once servant Interior Sec. Mar Roxas and the massacring Moro separatists called it a “mis-encounter.” Their coinage justified the killings to have stemmed from failure to coordinate with the rebels, with whom P-Noy has a supposed truce.

We bosses didn’t buy it. Eventually truths outed. One, the rebels to whom chief servant P-Noy yearly will give multibillions of our pesos had finished off the wounded commandos with shots to the head. Two, directing the commando operation on P-Noy’s bidding was his bosom pal, suspended PNP chief Alan Purisima. Three, Purisima should have done the coordinating with the military and the rebels, but didn’t for he felt unbound by duty, precisely because suspended.

Roxas scolded police subordinates for blaming P-Noy, saying they should have sought the latter’s side. “We did,” the subs reminded Roxas of even coursing their invitation through him. Roxas claimed to have forgotten because of too much work, so that’s that. We the bosses again didn’t buy it. How could Mamasapano have slipped his mind, when we were talking about it everyday for two months?

When our leftfielders heard that P-Noy supposedly ached to be let to talk, they invited him to their Congress servants’ quarters. Yet at once P-Noy deputy chatterer Abigail Valte sneered that it would be impolite.

Two more chatterers, successive rights defenders Leila de Lima and Etta Rosales, dropped the “mis” to picture it as “encounter.” Their hairsplitting depicted the massacrers as wronged because trespassed. But we bosses saw through their ploy. It was all to get our Congress servants to go along with the yearly multibillion-peso doles to the rebels.

Fooling us bosses too are our transport servants. They ask us for money to renew our driving licenses, yet give us none. They ask for more to register our vehicles, but give no plates or even stickers. They raise commuter train fares yet care not for the rails or their service.

There’s worse. They combine the train ticketing, but move the long designed common station to a site least convenient for us bosses. They allot our cash for new airports yet do no work, like in Mactan, Cebu. Meanwhile, the one in Manila is rotting from neglect. Servants have not fixed the ceiling that keeps collapsing. They keep from us their closure of Terminal-3 aircraft loading-unloading Bay 114, sinking because shoddily built atop an underground spring.

For all their failures, those transport servants have the temerity to blame “port congestion.”

Yet who contrived the Manila port congestion, if not their fellow servants at Customs? With import duties dropping to 1 to 5 percent, those thieves no longer could extort commissions from us. So they clogged the release of our containers in order to continue mulcting us. We had to pay up, lest we be fined additional shipping, berthing, and leasing fees for late takeout of the containers.

More unreliable servants are at agriculture, natural resources, and budget. Food prices rise even during harvests, because their cartelist-pals control the smuggling. Mines are given away to Chinese who fashion the metals into weapons and surveillance systems to steal our reefs. Our money is divvied up like pork slabs among the higher servants.

P-Noy won’t apologize for it, just as the Mamasapano massacrers won’t say sorry for executing our commandos. Humbling himself before us bosses is beneath the chief servant. He conjures tales, such as, disagreers with him are anti-peace and -reform. Or, that if we don’t go along, then we better start counting body bags. Or, that decriers of the massacrers are anti-Muslim.

Yet what P-Noy offers is not peace but surrender. He aims not for reform but mere switch of dog breed. The Moro rebels will not change Muslim Mindanao, but only take over power from the long-ruling datu-politicos.

So expect that poorest Muslim region to remain such, in spite of our multibillion-peso annual grants. The rebels will only use our money to build up armories at par with our Armed Forces, and then continue to secede.

Expect the rest of the country too to stay poor, hungry, and sick; unschooled, unsheltered, and abused. That is our lot as bosses. Yet the servants enrich themselves from our wealth.

Desperate, we bosses can only daydream of solutions. We think that a whole bad generation perhaps must pass away, so the uncorrupted babes can take over.

Careful what to wish for; it just may be granted. That generational passage had happened 3,000 years ago to another nation, for us to learn from. In exodus, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years — a generation. That trek of about 300 miles should have taken only 30 days. Although God-chosen, they shunned the right and embraced the wicked, and so lost their way. Only a handful of the original trekkers entered the Promised Land. Most of the jubilant entrants had been innocent babes when they began, or were born along the way.

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