THE Freeman reported yesterday that the City of Naga has so far received financial aid totaling P10 million for victims of the killer landslide that struck a large portion of Barangay Tina-an on Sept. 20.
Make it P11 million now. Yesterday, Kepco Philippines Inc. president Go Jae Han delivered to City Mayor Kristine Chiong another check for P1 million as its contribution to the relief and rehabilitation efforts for the families of the landslide victims. Earlier, the Kepco power plant in Naga and the SPC Power Corp., through its chief executive officer Dennis Villareal, also donated P1 million each for the landslide victims.
But even as financial assistance continues to pour in, the city remains in need of more warm bodies to repack donated items before they are distributed to the affected families. I hope our colleges and universities will respond to this call for help by sending students to do community service. Companies can also do repacking work as part of their corporate social responsibility program.
The need is urgent because some of the donated items are perishable. Surely, we do not want a repetition of that shameful incident where goods coming from foreign donors intended for typhoon Yolanda victims had to be burned because they have become useless after they were kept in storage for too long.
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Say what, students are being recruited to join the communist plot to oust President Duterte by showing films depicting the hardships and the abuses that the people suffered under the Marcos martial law regime?
That’s strange. I thought all the time that the truth will set you free and, in this case, the truth is that we lost our freedoms and, for many, their lives; the country lost billions of pesos; and businessmen lost their businesses--under martial law. These are truths that are screaming to be told and re-told and re-told until the shameless attempts to revise history by those who profited from martial law are defeated absolutely.
The State has a duty to protect itself, not just for Duterte’s sake but ours, too. We have seen too many destabilization attempts in the past and they only succeeded in making life more difficult for us. Any extra-constitutional attempt to unseat Duterte does not deserve the people’s support.
But we should not be prevented from telling the truth especially to those who were fortunate enough not to have been born to the horrors of martial rule. The Armed Forces of the Philippines says that in showing the film, the students are being brainwashed into thinking that Duterte is going to be another Ferdinand Marcos. If such were the case, all that has to be done is for Duterte to show that he is not and will never be one.
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Mocha Uson has resigned from the government. But she is not going back to sexy dancing. She has her blog to preoccupy her and, as she hinted, she will enter politics.
If she does, it will not be for the Senate where she has very little, if at all, chances of winning, if the surveys are to be believed. My guess is that she will join the party-list races, the same route that another propagandist, Harry Roque, took to gain entry to the House.
She will most probably win as party-list representative. Her blog has millions of followers and it is easy to assume that these are all her fans. I personally like to see her in the House. Even if she could not come up with any meaningful piece of legislation (we have too many laws anyway), she would at least enliven the working environment of her colleagues and enrich their language.
Goodbye, Mocha. See you, Mocha.