The photo of tables stacked with P1,000 bills during last week’s House of Representatives inquiry showed the sheer extent of corruption. Each peso there represents the face of a victim of corruption.
Those are not just money bills; they are the faces of hungry children, sick and abandoned elderly, jobless workers and commuters who struggle in their commute during downpours. Every peso stolen is a meal, a medicine, or a classroom taken away.
And when people fail to take action on these revelations of corruption, they disregard the real pain. Corruption is not a crime without victims, but it can be a crime without enough outrage.
Outrage over the greed of these individuals and the people we have entrusted with our future. To express this outrage can take many forms.
One such expression is a Sept. 21 rally planned at the People Power Monument to denounce corruption in flood control projects worth billions of pesos. A Rappler report said Catholic and Protestant leaders called on Filipinos to join the protest action. Organizers called it the “Trillion Peso March,” referring to the P1.9 trillion spent on flood control projects over the past 15 years, much of which has gone to corruption, the report said. The date is symbolic as Sept. 21 marks the anniversary of the declaration of martial law by dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, father of the incumbent President.
Beyond rallies, there are petitions, signature campaigns, public statements and other expressions of disgust that are starting to spread.
But lasting change requires more than temporary outrage. It means refusing to vote for or reelect public officials accused of graft. Too often, people dismiss investigations in Congress as useless and only for show. It could be because of what they’ve seen in the past. That the powerful who are linked to corruption get cleared of the charges or their cases dropped.
Still, those who shrug off scandals as “just politics” or “normal” fail to see that they themselves are the victims of corruption. The poor feel it most, but we all pay the price in lost services and suffer the consequences of government neglect.
In Cebu, the perennial floods remind us that drainage projects often exist only on paper. When the rain comes, families wade through filthy water, businesses lose customers and income and traffic grinds to a halt. If corruption did not eat into public works budgets, our streets might not turn into canals after every heavy downpour.
It may seem easier to dismiss corruption as politics or just for show without any concrete results. But every dismissal of attempts to investigate corruption makes us complicit. To resign ourselves to corruption is to absolve the guilty and erase the faces of those who suffer.
And the next time we see those piles of money bills displayed as evidence, we should picture not faceless billions of pesos but real, flesh-and-blood victims. People like us.
