I am beginning to suspect that the bullet scam at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport has been politically hijacked. The initial cases of bullets being planted in airline passengers' luggages were of course clearly a part of an extortion racket. But for the bullet planting to continue even after the shit has hit the fan is, to me, getting too preposterous.
The issue has already drawn international attention. Even the United Nations has warned its staff to be wary and cautious when using Philippine airports. It is everywhere on social media. A Senate investigation has been initiated into the matter. And still the bullets keep popping up in those darn luggages. What is happening here?
I think what is happening is that the issue has become a convenient tool to boost one's political stock or to bring down the political stock of another. Now I would have no idea who might have seized the opportunity to profit from the issue, but I think someone is trying to sustain the issue in order to squeeze from it every last once of political juice that can possibly squeeze.
Either that, or the people truly involved in the scam are simply too brazen and incorrigible to bother about all the attention it is getting. If I was one of those involved, I would lie low for a while and wait until another controversy erupts somewhere else. But that is just me. Nevertheless, I still am not comfortable with the idea that those involved would persist in the spotlight, brazen and incorrigible though they may be.
One can be brazen and incorrigible even if he lies low for a while. But to persist as if nothing is the matter is just too incredible. It defies both logic and imagination, such that the only way it can be explained is that, perhaps, a method has been devised to sustain the madness. And that method cannot be anything else but politics.
Not that I do not want the targets of these political attacks, if indeed they are, to squirm and spin in the wind. I do. These targets, and you obviously know who they are, richly deserve to be punished for lying to and betraying the Filipino people. They are hypocrites who need to be repudiated in any venue and by any means and if this is one way of making them pay, so be it.
But there is neither joy nor beauty in payback time if truth does not reveal itself to give context to the consequence. When you punish somebody, you have to let him know why he is being punished. If he does not get it, then justice will not be served even if it may appear to be so. Those who are being punished now must be made to understand that they are being punished not for being such bad boys in the first place, but because two can play the game.
Those who now wield power have not been exactly fair in wielding that power, especially when using it against their enemies. They have shown neither restraint nor compunction in using every available trick or institution to make sure their enemies are ground into the mud. That human dignity gets no respect from madmen is shown in no greater clarity than now under the current yoke we bear.
And so, if the bullet scam has been hijacked in order to exact political revenge by one against the other, so be it. Let the chips fall where they may. Never in the history of this once proud and beautiful country has an entire nation been so shamed and embarrassed by its leadership, a leadership of liars and hypocrites that promises one thing and does the exact opposite.