Tuesday, September 04, 2007 Editorial: Tough rhetoric
THE latest headline grabber in Davao City is last Sunday's television outburst of Mayor Rody Duterte against the violations of law by Korean tourists and junketeers hosted by the Apo View Hotel's casinos. (There are actually two casinos, the older one capitalized by Malaysians and the recent one bankrolled by Koreans. In order to comply with legal requirements, both are managed by Casino Filipino or Pagcor. In the latter, no Filipino, except Pagcor dealers and gambling pit bosses, is allowed inside.)
While Mayor Duterte zeroed in on violations of the city's anti-smoking ordinance by hotel guests, he also rattled off a lot of other misconducts committed by tourists, especially Koreans, in reports reaching him with regularity.
As the saying goes, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." When the law is being violated with impunity despite the dire consequences of the act, sometimes there is a need to talk tough if only to remind those who break the law that there are no sacred cows; those who enforce the law are "in the right" while those who break the law are "in the wrong"--no "ifs" and "buts" about it.
There is a downside in our being overly hospitable to visitors, especially white men or caucasians. We are too often accommodating to them for no valid reason; we bend our laws to please them, we just smile even if they trample upon our hallowed customs and traditions. This is not the way they treat us when we are tourists in their land.
So, let's stop being too deferential to tourists. We - hosts, law enforcers and ordinary men on the streets - are at times guilty of subsuming our dignity as we salivate over the mighty dollar that they dangle before our eyes. A simple reading of our yearly statistics on tourist arrivals - a paltry 3 million after half a century - should be enough to make us realize that being subservient to foreigners is not helping us improve our tourism industry.
If they violate our laws, we throw the book at them. Jail them if they insist on their erring ways. To draw the line beyond which abusive foreigners may not go, is to shed vestiges of our colonial mentality. It's about time, too.
