|
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Obenieta: Frat in the face
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star Essay
Every father next door won’t lose sleep or call for his mother’s help if he would know his daughter’s company till the cock crows is someone who behaves brotherly. You’re the man. Or so he’d anoint you if it would appear you have been all ears to moral lessons from the Brothers Grimm and have grown up gentle, as though anointed enough to know even, well, “the divine secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood.”
But trust his paternal instinct if it seemed to him like his “little girl” was off with someone hot to trot for a gang bang.
Sniff trouble, and snort. Just like the way Cebu Provincial Police Chief Vicente Loot has been hardnosed while a dead rat seems to waft around the word “frat.” If he had any daughters, chances are he’d tack a reminder on their bedroom wagging a warning, “Beware of some cats.” More so, he’d aver, if they particularly happen to be members of Tau Gamma Phi and Alpha Kappa Rho (Akhro).
Robert Burns may have waxed lyrical when he wrote, “Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress…” But the two warring fraternity groups, gone bloody prosaic and trite in the mire of media allegations that reeked of misdemeanors and reckless imprudence, saw no poetic justice in Loot’s evocation of them as a “menace to society.” Seen as having frowned at the constitutional guarantee on freedom of association and assembly, he explained his plan to move for the declaration of the rival Tau Gamma and Akhro as criminal groups and whittle them down to the level of street gangs.
“The common problems identified in some areas, especially near the city, are frat wars,” he noted. If he’d have his way, frat members will be banned from schools, thus discouraging students from joining the fraternities. They may feel good while claiming to have undertaken civic projects, but they’re far better, suggested Loot, at “getting themselves in trouble.”
Blood, shed in the heat of rivalry, is thicker than the slobber of sentimentality about brotherhood and unity. Or so Loot might as well have cut short the romantic, albeit, macho notion watered down by overgrown brats pitting against each other as though the only way to settle their supremacy was to see whose piss had the longest trajectory.
“Puro lang na sila pasikat,” Loot groaned. Then again, that’s a quirk not only Tau Gamma or Akhro is guilty of.
Same thing holds true, after all, in the way brotherhood has been warped where power is appropriated as a prop for self-interests. Of blood-chilling consequences, see the “tayo-tayo, kanya-kanya” mindset of exclusivity prevailing in such perk-happy cliques in Congress or in any bureaucratic monolith. And that’s true as well in the police organization, Loot conceded.
How to chill out the flaring tempers of the rival groups? They, suggested Loot, could all gather in one place “for boxing, judo, or karatedo” to vent their anger without having to shoot and harm civilians in the process. Better yet, they could outdo each other earning brownie points by either unmasking the identity of vigilante-style murderers hounding the city or helping the police in warding off criminality in the streets.
If that’s too rough, they could hold a discussion group like Oprah’s reading club, discuss and blow their brains out through the moral minefield, for instance, of Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov. Which, by the way, features the most intense, violent and spiritually tortured a group of boys as one would likely encounter in literature.
Better yet— if reading’s a bore or if nothing less than war and inflicting harm would hold them rapt— they could try witchcraft.
(September 18, 2005 issue)
Write letter to the editor. Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board. Click here. |
|
[return to top]
[home]
[network page]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
SUPERBALITA
WEEKEND
|
