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Sunday, March 16, 2003
Obenieta: Look who’s talking in his sleep
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
How to wake up a city too sweet and dreamy for comfort, or too wrapped up and snug in its security blanket?
Raising a hand, a certain Alvin Tilos had an answer when he roused the neighborhood at Punta Princesa in the wee hours of the morning last Friday. No need for the cops to dunk their heads into their steaming coffee cups. It was enough to stir them up: the red-eyed Tilos clutching a hand grenade and crowing about his threat to unfasten its pin.
Fortunately, the police came in the nick of time and nudged the city back to slumber, to snore away the mosquitoes’ rumors of some nightmares elsewhere. Smoke like fog smudging the sunrise in Mindanao.
Suicide bombers swooping down on Israel. The black wind blowing over Iraq.
No need to get a slab of rock for a pillow, really. The egg on your plate may be sunny-side up, but the morning news dawns upon you— a pall of portents. Neither do you need to ask the worm writhing in the beak of the early bird, nor wake up at the wrong side of the bed to wonder: what’s up in the air?
But forget the bloody cynics and the cry of mosquitoes for a while. See how, like suckers, optimists are born every minute. Consider the morning breeze, or the way it doesn’t ruffle the hairs of Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) Director Josephus Angan.
It’s the land of morning, man. Or so Angan could have sung of Cebu. No dark city, this. And hell-raisers like the bomb-brandishing Tilos are just flies in the ointment of his optimism, too easy to shrug off or swat away. In this metropolis, the dark is only in the recesses of the sleep-deprived minds of people like Tilos. Or the color of their eye bags.
That might explain why nothing— short of terrorists painting the town purple— bugs Angan who seemed to see nothing but sweetness and light.
No cause for alarm on the city’s peace and order,” thus he waxed upbeat a day after a student was killed in his own yard, a doctor was knifed dead in her own room, a patient shot to kingdom come inside a hospital ward.
In the wake of these murders and the recent news that crime is on the upswing, Angan stays unfazed. Not reason enough to break out in cold sweat while the night howls outside, he stressed. What’s a gooseflesh if not second skin to a city on the wings of progress?
Such bloodstained reports were “problems that come with being an urbanized city such as Cebu.” Not that the police will “sleep on these crimes,” averred Angan as he pointed out that “we are obligated to solve this.” Not that such a quandary is solely the authorities’ cup of coffee. If you can sleep with one eye open, fine by Angan et al who asked you and me “to remain vigilant and to be watchful of suspicious-looking persons.”
And let’s not be too overdramatic as to scream at the shadows on the wall. Besides, he believed “these incidents did not have the same impact as that of the bombing at an airport in Davao.”
According to him, too, you were just dreaming if you deemed that a clean, well-lighted city were unsullied by shadows. The dark is merely a tricky function of light, or so he could have confounded us. Get real, will we? As Angan explained, “There are just some crimes that law enforcers and the community cannot control.”
Really?
Sapagkat tayo’y tao lamang, remember? To that, some lunkhead of an officer at the Waterfront Police Station could have wagged his wig off after he was caught pawing his pate last Wednesday when regional office bigwigs on a surprise inspection found him at his wit’s end.
Among several lapses noted by the inspectors — dirty surroundings and officers not in proper uniform, etc.— the station’s police non-commissioned officer did not know his duties and failed to answer when asked where his fellow policemen were. Neither was he aware of the station’s recent detail orders, or so sighed the inspectors who’ve been going the rounds to “improve the police force’s service… so that we will know what is actually happening.
In time, hopefully, the authorities will see that when crime rears up its bloody head, there is both a presence and an absence. Not only because grime sticking in the underbelly of urbanization is a clear and present fact, flagrantly so, but also because the craft in the art of playing cop is one yawning lack.
Who badly needs a wake-up call? Don’t ask the one who can only cool things down by whistling a Frank Sinatra tune, even if coffee spills over his anxious lips, still dreamy as if progress can happen only when we become a “city that never sleeps.”
(March 16, 2003 issue)
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