LAST week, about joining World Cleanup Day 2019. This week, more about cleaning up.
This week, about cleaning up the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) of hazing.
Unfortunately, our entire world is full of organizations and instances where hazing is a given, a set of hoops to be jumped through, challenges that must be conquered, orders that must be followed, activities that when all is said and done, make those who went through the ordeal of hazing part of the club. PMA is certainly not the sole nor first organization where hazing happens.
It exists on university campuses everywhere, for both male and females students. Not just for sororities and fraternities, but even in “orgs,” that term which all inclusively takes in any manner of gathering. It exists in institutions, whether as an overt undertaking or a covert one. It especially exists in male clubs of all sorts, and it certainly exists in the ranks of our uniformed personnel, the PMA included.
Yours truly actually taught in the PMA for a couple of years in the late 1970s to the early 1980s. In those days, hazing was a given. If you taught plebe classes, you could expect your plebe students to be unprepared for any sort of “academics” when they were in the classroom. Plebe classes meant, and anyone who taught in PMA during that era will attest to this, that 10 of 13 (classes were small then) of your students in any given plebe section would be asleep for some 30 minutes of a 40-minute class. I can only speculate about how the three who were awake managed to stay so. Though even they would doze off at one point of the class or other.
In the faculty office I belonged to, we were inculcated into waiting until Recognition Day to see any educational results, said day being when the hazing eased up, since the plebes were on that day then accepted into the Corps. I recollect what I can of academy hazing during those days and from a senior citizen standpoint, see just barbarism.
No. Hazing is not justified no matter what character-building rationalization is mouthed to justify it. To address it, Republic Act (RA) 8049, “...regulating hazing and other forms of initiation rites in fraternities, sororities, and other organizations and providing penalties therefor,” was enacted in this country in 1995. RA 11053 was passed last year to totally prohibit hazing and to regulate “other forms of initiation rites of fraternities, sororities, and other organizations, and...” provide “penalties for violations thereof...”
So now to the late Cadet Dormitorio. He was hazed to death. We cannot even begin to imagine how his parents and family feel. As a parent, my heart bleeds as I am sure other parents’ hearts do, too. As Filipinos all, let us demand justice from our courts and the institutions involved in this scandalous death. Let the full extent of the law be brought to the fore, and as the saying goes, though the heavens fall.