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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Ledesma: Death and corruption
By Jun Ledesma
Sunbursts
'It is as if December is what the Ecclesiastics appointed time to die.'
DEATH stalks and claims its mark. In the most furtive way, it comes, jolting its prey and those of us who are helpless and in the waiting for our turn to go into that good night.
It is as if December is what the Ecclesiastics appointed time to die. We have seen the devastation wrought by successive typhoons in Luzon. Watching the tragedy on the wide-screen TV, I could almost touch the lifeless bodies of the victims and feel the excruciating pain of despair of those who had survived.
Just before the images of desolation disappeared, my friend Tony Feo, figured in a smashup that left his body badly mangled and his car into a jumbled heap of steel. A speeding Bachelor bus, which was racing with an LCI Transit unit strayed into his lane and then dragged him 80 meters from the point of impact. His car, his first owned since he resigned from poverty, along with his lifeless body, was still under the bus when help came.
I drove three times to Tagum since the tragedy happened, and came home in the evening each time. Tony figured in that fatal accident at 9 p.m. somewhere in Salvacion, Panabo City. The stretch from Panabo to Carmen is a four-lane highway but it is also the most dangerous span. Driving through this road is quite confusing especially during nighttime. There is nothing that divides the left and the right lanes.
True, there are reflectors (cats eyes) but these no longer function the way they should. Sec. Dolfo del Rosario, with whom I shared my observation when I met him during the wake of Tony, said that the reflectors were only good for three months. He intimated that the reflectors, along with the rail guards that we see in the road curves and roads near steep inclines, are major source of corruption in the Department of Public highways. The products, he said, are substandard. But then, why should they toy with public safety?
The cries of those who mourn the deaths of the devastation in Luzon and the grief that the family of my friend and brother Tony is now going through are only overpowered by the stench of corruption in the government that caused these wanton tragedies to befall on the innocent.
As I watched the face of my friend drifting to his ethereal realm, comes the news that FPJ, the King of the Philippine movies, suffered a stroke and then lapsed into a coma only to sleep into eternity. But while he was sauntering between staying and going into the celestial city where he will be star forever, we were staggered by breaking news that General Santos was again bombed. And, like in the past, the murderer only claimed the lives of innocent civilians.
(Hardly had the anguish dissipated when came the info from a friend that Catalina "Kiling" Dacudao, daughter of our coffee-drinking mate, former Davao City Mayor and DILG Secretary Luis Santos, died in her flat in London where she serves as tourism attache.)
Like all storms, even this gruesome cyclone of corruption will pass away. Life has to move on. We should look forward to a blessed day but then we should, collectively, strike the dark forces of corruption in every turn. In the meantime we share the grief of friends over their irreparable loss.
(December 15, 2004 issue)
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