Sunday, July 06, 2008 Malilong: Vice president's statement By Frank Malilong The Other Side
VICE President Noli de Castro should stop grandstanding and act like the responsible public official that he is supposed to be. Politicians are famous for their inability to resist the temptation to look good at all cost to the public but the vice president established a new low for political gimmickry when he claimed that the ship captain of the ill-fated Princess of the Stars was not dead but in hiding.
There is nobility in not speaking ill against someone who cannot rise to defend himself and it is tragic to see this virtue lost by someone who already holds a high public office and is known to be aspiring for an even higher one. That he was merely repeating a rumor that he had heard did not make de Castro’s transgression any less condemnable. On the other hand, the fact that he knew that it was only rumor ought to have warned him to be more prudent with his statements.
Nothing compares with the pain from the loss of a loved one. Every morning during the last couple of weeks, I have seen grieving faces at the Cebu City Sports Center anxiously waiting for news about family members who went missing and presumably perished during the sinking. One can imagine the ordeal that they’re going through.
It is easy for them to blame, even hate, the ship captain for the tragic turn in their lives. That would have been understandable. But to this day, I still have to read about someone among those camped in the city’s hastily-converted action center claiming, as de Castro did, that the Star’s skipper is on the lam.
They know better. They know that members of the Marimon family are just as in grief as they are and do not wish to add more to their burden. They have no reason to; they have nothing to gain from it. Unlike de Castro, they are not politicians but ordinary people and, even more unlike him, they do not believe in making a political fortune out of somebody else’s misfortune.
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The letters keep coming in. Karl A.E.F. Cabilao, an architect who is currently working on a master’s degree in architecture (major in Urban Planning) cited the “noteworthy achievement” of Curitiba, Brazil in solving their public transportation problem.
Cabilao said he also takes the jeepney but added that it’s about time that they be replaced with a more efficient mass transport system that will decongest our roads and highways. He also suggested, as an alternative to a total phase-out, that jeepneys be allowed to operate only in collector roads, transporting people from far-flung barangays to a designated spot towards the main road.
But for these reforms to take place, he said, we need not only political will but also the “open-mindedness of the general public, especially the jeepney drivers and their families.”
From New York, Danny Maglasang wrote to ask whatever happened to former governor Lito Osmeña’s dream of an elevated train system linking Carcar to Danao. Lito even had a blue print of the project after the feasibility study that he commissioned, Danny said. Alas, Danny, the blue print may be the only one left of Lito’s dream.
I know that there is a social dimension to the proposal to phase out the jeepneys. How do you deal with the drivers who will be displaced? We cannot just abandon them to fend for themselves and their families.
But the plan is to do it gradually. That is why it is called a phase-out. For as long as all the stakeholders--–the drivers, operators, the commuters and the general public--–share the same goal and believe in the same dream, nothing is impossible.
