Noynoy should have gone to NAIA

Clearly, neither Noynoy Aquino nor Mar Roxas saw Friday's broad daylight shooting of a Mindanao mayor at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport as important enough to merit their quick personal presence, unlike what they did when men armed with hammers robbed a jewelry store in a mall.

In that robbery, the sudden appearance of no less than the president and the interior secretary far eclipsed the novelty of the crime and the ingenuity of how it was carried out, making it seem ordinary compared to the much more interesting twist of who came running.

But the question now arises -- if no less than the president and the interior secretary can find a mere robbery compelling enough to require their personal appearance, why not the far more sensational crime, and definitely far more interesting story about a mayor gunned down at the country's premier international gateway?

If you ask me, if Noynoy and Mar had to be anywhere at all, the Ninoy Aquino International Airport shooting, which also killed the mayor's wife and two others, including a child who just happened to arrive with his family from the Visayas, was where they should have been.

While I submit that it is none of the business of the president, and to some extent the interior secretary, to be at the scene of ordinary crimes, the airport shooting can easily qualify for an exemption, for a number of reasons.

One is that the NAIA is not just an ordinary airport, or ordinary place, for that matter. As the country's premier international gateway, it is in a very large sense a mirror of the country. To people like transit passengers just passing through, it may be their only experience of being in the country.

And it is no exaggeration to say that the country, not just the airport, just got dealt a very terrible blow to its image because of what just happened at the NAIA. And no incident could have been worse than a mass murder to further tarnish the image of an airport long on the global radar as among the world's worst.

Not only will the mass murder further seal the reputation of NAIA as one of the world's worst, it will further seal the image of the country itself as deserving of the many travel advisories issued against it, the same advisories that we vehemently protest as unfair and undeserved.

Well, while most travel advisories have been issued against mainly specific areas in the Philippines such as Mindanao, the shooting incident now puts a bloody finger right in the very heart of the capital itself. What this will do to the tourism slogan "It's more fun in the Philippines" I do not know. But it will be dire.

That is why I feel that if Noynoy and Mar had to be anywhere at all, they should have promptly sped to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to at least give a quick sense of order and control. The stirring picture of lawlessness needed to be quickly squelched. But Noynoy and Mar were nowhere near.

One other reason why Noynoy himself should have gone is because the Ninoy Aquino in Ninoy Aquino International Airport refers to his own father, who interestingly was himself gunned down there. Noynoy should have quickly realized how important it was to arrest the airport's freefalling reputation.

Of course the memories of his father's assassination may be a sore wound that never completely healed. But then again, nobody said the job of a president is ever easy. The people never asked him to be president. It was he who asked for their votes. They merely gave him what he wanted, so it is too late for any excuses now.

To be sure, the tarnished image of NAIA may be too far gone to redeem by a mere gesture. It will have to take years of consistent nurturing and care for it to regain past glory and rekindle people's confidence. That is why it would have helped if Noynoy had been there to give the crisis a face of stability.

Whether you like Noynoy or not, there is always something in the office he holds that provides a calming effect on any situation. When the president, any president, is in the room, there is always this feeling that everything will, somehow, be all right. Noynoy should have gone to NAIA.