Wild goose chase
The Liberal Party should stop invoking "daang matuwid" in face of everything that is contrary to the claim. How can the LP say it hews to the straight path when a high party official, newly-installed Interior and Local Government secretary Mel Sarmiento, had no qualms firing the Benguet provincial police director for no other reason than that the province notched the highest number of casualties from typhoon Lando at 14.
Of course I know where Sarmiento got his inspiration for the madness -- his boss Noynoy Aquino. When supertyphoon Yolanda nearly wiped out Tacloban and the rest of Eastern Visayas from the face of the earth, Noynoy fired the Eastern Visayas regional police director for saying the number of casualties could top 10,000. Noynoy did not want history to associate that many dead with his term.
In fact, so obsessed was Noynoy with keeping the numbers down that he stopped the official body count from Yolanda at 6,000. He played deaf and blind to the fact that even as the number of dead officially stopped at 6,000 on his orders, hundreds and hundreds more bodies kept getting unearthed for weeks thereafter. In the end, the sacked police officer was right. But he was just a police officer who did not get the hint. And Noynoy was president.
Noynoy has delusions the presidency has bestowed on him God-like powers. His order for zero casualties at the onset of every typhoon is not to be trifled with. It springs from a genuine belief that he can will away any casualties from nature's furies and woe unto those who cannot get it. Noynoy's obsession with weather has spawned at least one copycat. Remember the chap who wants to change our seasons to fall, winter, summer and spring? Well, he too wants to be president.
Of course, police officers have no choice because Noynoy is the commander-in-chief -- although he was nowhere to be found during Mamasapano and was more of a car enthusiast than a leader of men. What the commander-in-chief says, men in uniform must follow to the letter. When Noynoy decrees there must be zero casualties, no one is supposed to die. And if death cannot be helped, police officers are expected to underreport the number of casualties.
But then, where is the "daang matuwid" in that? It cannot be "daang matuwid" if you lie about the number of casualties. It cannot be "daang matuwid" if you fire police officers who merely reported the true number of casualties. But because "daang matuwid" is just a charade and an illusion, then it follows that playing around with the number of dead is in keeping with the charade and the illusion.
The same is true in dealing with the aftermath of typhoons. Did you notice that, in the distribution of relief goods, Mar Roxas and Leni Robredo were there too? There was no way you could have missed them. They were in the Liberal Party yellow. But isn't Roxas already resigned? And isn't Robredo only a congresswoman in her district? Did "daang matuwid" take them straight to the typhoon's path?
But while Roxas and Robredo had to be everywhere in the typhoon Lando ravaged areas, unabashedly using government resources to campaign, Roxas was not fired by the same enthusiasm during the much more devastating aftermath of Yolanda in 2013. In fact, he famously drew distinctions in the government's response to Tacloban as running along political -- Aquino vs. Romualdez -- lines.
Noynoy himself even more famously told a Tacloban survivor to his face that he had nothing to complain about because he managed to escape with his life and was still alive, a clear reflection of the kind of thinking upon which the "daang matuwid" principle must thread. Such a principle has taken Filipinos on a wild goose chase and must be exposed for what it is and repudiated.
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