DESPITE everything you read in the papers or hear or watch on the news on the radio or TV, there are many good, selfless, honest individuals out there.
They don’t grab the headlines because, well, their deeds don’t necessarily scream exciting, intriguing or salacious even.
How interesting can it be if so and so spoke the truth and nothing but the truth during a public inquiry as opposed to someone getting caught for lying about their unexplained wealth?
Or would you rather want to know about the woman who spends one day a week with indigent pupils, playing with them and feeding them, or the one who has an affair with her neighbor’s husband?
I mean, you get my drift.
Many acts of kindness go unnoticed. Every day. I don’t know why that is so. Perhaps it’s because people are innately good and automatically expect that from other people.
I also believe that many of the honest-to-goodness good-doers don’t like to be in the spotlight. So there’s no point in trumpeting what is already secondary to our nature. Right?
Still, we wouldn’t have progressed as a society or a civilization if the majority of the population were so downright wicked. Again, I am assuming that we have progressed.
At any rate, I’d like to share what my former colleague Garry Cabotaje posted on his Facebook wall.
I hope he doesn’t mind since I didn’t ask for his permission to write about it. But it’s not every day that a whole city recognizes a person for his honesty.
On Friday, Sept. 11, 2020, the City Council of Naga did just that after Jeorge Alano, a driver of Ken Taxi and a resident of Barangay Langtad in the city, returned a wallet containing almost P19,000 in cash to his passenger Alvin Lucenos of Cebu City.
Lucenos had inadvertently left his wallet in the taxi when he got off in Pardo, Cebu City. The money was for his baby’s baptism.
When local officials found out about it, Councilor Afshin Mark Señor came up with a resolution to recognize and to commend Alano’s “exemplary act.”
Vice Mayor Virgilio Chiong presided over the regular session where Señor’s colleagues in the council approved his motion en masse.
Alano could easily have kept the money. His income had been affected when taxi operations were forced to shut down when Cebu was placed on enhanced community quarantine to try and contain the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
But he didn’t. And it wasn’t the first time that the cabbie of more than 30 years has done a similar act.
The council also learned that Alano returned P1 million in cash to a passenger when he was driving in Manila.
Now, wasn’t that a nice Sunday read?