Uncommon valor

TEACHER’S HEROISM Day, January 30, has served in the past few years as an opening event in the annual celebration of Kaganapan cityhood charter celebration in the City of San Fernando.

A most auspicious event to start the coming-to- fulfilment – that’s what “kaganapan” precisely means in Pilipino — of whatever promised greatness for this capital city and its people.

But for a select few in-the-know at city hall itself, who is even remotely aware of the meaning of that day? Of what heroic act the teachers accomplished and are now celebrated for. Or, who these teachers even were.

The significance of the event not only to the city but to the country itself prodded me to re-issue this piece published here some years back.

The “Rape of Democracy” it was called by the mosquito press – the intrepid underground publications and tabloids of the time – as it merited little if any play-up in the mainstream Marcosian media, especially in its flagship broadsheet Daily Express which was derisively punned and fittingly panned as the Daily Suppress.

So, the electorate was allowed to vote freely in the local elections of 1980. But the manual counting and canvassing of their votes was an altogether different matter.

Sensing imminent wholesale defeat for the administration’s Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) candidates – yes wholesale, as bloc voting was prescribed by the Commission on Elections itself – even at the onset of the counting, operatives of the party in-power let loose their armed goons upon the polling precincts, taking the ballot boxes and all election materials, and – when they resisted – the teachers themselves.

Fading memory now notwithstanding, it was in the small barangay of Malpitic that the news of the “snatching of ballots” and “kidnapping of teachers” first came out, and spread fast across town with reports of similar incidents occurring in practically all barangays of San Fernando.

Herded at the municipal hall and under pain of death, the teachers were forced to play the charade of vote-canvassing – first reading “KBL,” then tallying the vote in the designated KBL box of the canvass sheet, regardless of what was written on the ballot.

No mere urban legend were the stories of the teachers – in fits of nervousness and intense stress – peeing in their skirts and, perhaps on impulse of courageous defiance, reduced to stuttering “LBK,” “KLB,” and “BLK,” everything but the acronym they were forced to utter.

Truly, a stuff of legend though was the fearless stand of the teachers led by Madam Tess Tablante to publicly expose the ordeal they went through that forced the regime to nullify the election results – acknowledging that the teachers were “threatened and coerced into making spurious election returns without regard to the genuine ballots in the ballot boxes” – and unseated the Comelec-proclaimed winner, re-electionist Armando P. Biliwang.

In the interregnum ensued an unprecedented rule of succession with a Philippine Constabulary officer, Col. Amante S. Bueno, deputy commander for administration of the 3rd Regional PC Zone at Camp Olivas, taking over as OIC-Mayor, and succeeded by lawyer Vic Macalino, on the recommendation of the Honorable Estelito P. Mendoza, governor of Pampanga, secretary of justice, solicitor-general, among other titles.

The political impasse coming to an end with the special mayoralty election in 1983 won by Virgilio “Baby” Sanchez, who was Biliwang’s predecessor. That this: the teachers defending – with their very lives if needed – the sanctity of the vote at the height of the dictatorship when elections were a mockery of democracy, was damned heroic.

That in all of the Philippines where electoral terrorism was wanton practice, such heroism had to happen in San Fernando could only speak of redoubtable courage, a testimony to true grit of the local teachers.

January 30, 1980 in San Fernando is no mere footnote but a shining milestone in the history of the Filipino struggle for democracy, coming as it is full six years before the EDSA People Power Revolt that finally ousted the dictatorship.

More than just being opening event to the annual celebration of Kaganapan, Teachers’ Heroism Day needs to be memorialized – in stone, as in a monument to the courageous teachers, most fittingly at the Heroes Park; in book form, as in an oral history of the personal accounts of the teachers themselves.

In this era of fake news and forged histories, that task for the city government is as much incumbent as urgent. As much for the teachers, as for patrimony of the Fernandino.

So, what’s keeping the city from doing it?  

Deconstructing EdSa

INTO THE last half of his third and last term as City of San Fernando hizzoner, has Edwin “EdSa” Santiago been bitten by the construction bug and developed an edifice complex?

So, how does this impact in his city and people?

P300-M convention center to rise in San Fernando. So screamed SunStar-Pampanga this weekend past, reporting of Santiago, along with 3^rd District Rep. Aurelio “Dong” Gonzales and DPWH officials, breaking ground for the project in Barangay Calulut.

“This is another of our priority projects that aim to spur development in this area of the city and would galvanize the role of the capital as perfect place to host major events and gatherings.” So was Gonzales quoted.

“We have been pushing for growth areas in the city and this area is one of them. This project will surely bring in much needed development.” So Santiago echoed.

“This project will make government a direct competitor – formidable at that for simply being government – of the privately owned convention centers in the capital.” So a number of local businesspeople cried. No, not one of them having any interest, personal or financial, in the LausGroup Events Center and the Kingsborough International Convention Center.
My, my, my! Is it by some serendipity, or irony, that it was at the LausGroup Event Center in July 2018, in his state of the city address, that Santiago announced what SunStar-Pampanga duly reported thus: City of San Fernando to establish P1.2-B civic center.

Of the amount, some P236 million had already been allocated for funding, so Santiago was quoted as saying. And that “some of the projects have already been started like the command and control center, youth development center, multipurpose center, central evacuation center, Department of Education training center, special drug education center and the technical vocational school.”

It was though at the launch of Kaganapan 2019 in February last year that Santiago made the civic center project as centerpiece of the cityhood anniversary celebrations. To much public acclaim, I vividly remember.  
Having that in mind, I expected Santiago to announce another mega infra project at Monday’s news conference launching Kaganapan 2020, if only in keeping with last year’s impressive template. The still-hush-hush P600-million (or is it P650-M?) loan that the sangguniang panlungsod reportedly approved only last week to be contracted with the LandBank of the Philippines (?) for the rehabilitation of the old public market, I had hoped Santiago would unravel but did not.   

That nothing on this issue has come out officially from the city government – not from the council, not from the mayor – not only merited those question marks in the above paragraph but, moreso, fanned the flames of controversy, and validated the speculations, mostly unkind if not downright damning, about it.

In the run-up to the 2019 local polls, Santiago – on local cable television – vehemently denied any loan for a market project. No loans involved: CSF granted P500M for new market, so headlined SunStar-Pampanga on May 7, 2019.

Santiago was quoted in the story as saying “the redevelopment of the new public market here will be funded by the Office of the President, contrary to claims that the city government took a loan to pursue the project.”

Claiming further: “…the Office of the President granted the city government’s request for assistance amounting to P500 million.”
“We presented the study to the Malacañan Palace and just recently, we finally received their response which meant that they are granting our request.” So was Santiago quoted.
Reported the paper: “Based on a letter from the Office of the President dated March 13, 2019, it “identified the project under Priority Funding in Fiscal Year 2019” and is only awaiting some documents before the Department of Budget Management facilitates the release of funds.”

Declared Santiago: “There is no loan, we never took one. We looked for funding through our partners in the national government and we are very lucky that Malacañan heard our request.”
Pray, tell, dear mayor: Where is that P500-million grant from the Office of the President now?

Given the almost certainty of that P600 million (P650 million?) loan the city council last week approved (?) to be contracted by the city with the LBP (?), that grant was no more than hot, tepid, air – pautot, in kanto lingo – only for the campaign hustings.

Santiago – the sangguniang panlungsod too – is bound by duty, by transparency, to come clean about this – whichever: grant or loan? old market or new market? As well on the other infra projects being implemented by the city government.

Else, the most malicious of all imputations – of these as sources for pabaon or pakimkim – will impact upon them, primarily on Santiago, happening as these big-ticket infra projects – P300-M, P1.2-B, P500-M, P600-M or P650-M – are in his last term.

By the heart, defined

THE INRUSH of relief and aid initiated by Gov. Dennis “Delta” Pineda for the victims of the Taal Volcano eruptions has not slacked off among local officials of Pampanga as well as the local businessmen.

On Tuesday, Mabalacat Mayor Cris Garbo motored to Lemery, Batangas delivering P1.7-million in relief goods and P1 million cash for the victims.

The following day, Angeles City Mayor Carmelo “Pogi” Lazatin led a convoy of three truckloads of relief goods, a truckful of hygiene kits, ambulance and assorted vehicles carrying medical staff, social workers, and rescue teams to Lipa City and the towns of Tuy and Balayan.

Thursday, it was Mexico Mayor Teddy Tumang that personally delivered P1-million assistance to the provincial government and relief goods to evacuees at the Batangas Provincial Sports Complex.

Earlier, mayors who made their compassionate and helping presence among the evacuees included Apalit’s Jun Tetangco, Arayat’s Bon Alejandrino, and Sto. Tomas’ Gloria “Ninang” Ronquillo. The LGUs of Candaba and Floridablanca were reported to have sent corresponding assistance too.

Pampanga ICT mogul Dennis Anthony Uy personally handed a P5-million check to Batangas Gov. Hermilando Mandanas.

Earlier too, the Bridges of Benevolent Initiatives Foundation and the World Medical Relief Inc. Phil., at the initiative of Dr. Irineo “Bong” Alvaro, set an initial donation of P500,000 for the Taal victims.

All these, as private individuals, civic organizations, and professional groups – from wedding planners and events organizers to chefs and lawyers – continue to donate and solicit relief goods for distribution to the victims.

Aye, the heart of the Capampangan is not only in its right place, it is of solid gold. This, already manifest in the evacuation centers of Batangas, still finding that singular luster at the Banaba Center Elementary School – four-year-old evacuee Hendrix found afflicted with hydrocephalus and a heart condition, Governor Pineda immediately offering to shoulder the medical, as well as support expenses, for the boy’s treatment.

Payback time. So, the governor himself called the immediate response of Pampanga to the Taal Volcano eruptions: “Ito po ay ating pasasalamat dahil noon pong pumutok ang Mount Pinatubo, marami po ang tumulong sa atin para iligtas tayo at muling makabangon.”

Paying it forward, of course, is the more appropriate idiom – kindness returned by the recipient not to its originator but to another in need. The editor in me just could not help it there.

But then, in the greater, nobler scheme of things, what does semantics matter, when altruism, indeed, compassion becomes the very heart of the matter?   

The Taal eruptions made one defining moment of the governorship of Dennis Garcia Pineda and, by extension, of the Capampangan race. Duly attested by thousands of expressions of gratitude from the people of Batangas and elsewhere, and as much articulation of pride of their governor by the cabalens. The all-too trite Capampangan cu, pagmaragul cu never resounded with as much dignified truth as here, as now.  

Indelible – and spectacularly dramatic – as that definition is, it is but one more reaffirmation of the goodness of heart whence Delta was birthed and bred. That which has long been made a Capampangan truism: Alagang Nanay, Serbisyong Tunay…    

Of course, finding completion with the silent whisper of: …Walang sawang tulong ni Tatay.

Luid ya ing Capampangan.

Falsity for legacy

“THE REAL change we have all yearned for so long is now happening. We have made the significant starts, pioneered initiatives and accomplished impressive milestones as a nation during the first half of the Duterte administration … The President’s vision for a better Philippines is already a reality.”

So declared Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea last Friday, monumentalizing the regime’s self-proclaimed gains as his president’s legacy to the Filipinos.

This, at the launch of the information drive of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) on what it holds as the impact of the administration’s programs dubbed…yes, self-servingly, the “Duterte Legacy” grounded principally on the Build, Build, Build Program; Alternative Learning System; Poverty Reduction; Job Generation; the Bangsa Moro Basic Law; Universal Health Care; Universal Access to Tertiary Education; the Boracay and Manila Bay rehabilitation; and the war against illegal drugs.

Not so fast, Medialdea. Hold your gun, PCOO. Sen. Ping Lacson (no relation in any way) was quick to the draw: “It’s too early — just three years. So many things can still happen. They’re entitled, though, to do their own propaganda.”

The senator noting that it would be up to the people to judge whether the proffered legacy of the Duterte presidency is credible or not: “For example, if the government says they won the fight against graft and corruption, the public should ask: Is it true? If the government said they are successful at the anti-drug operation, people should ask: Is the government telling the truth?”

As indeed, a number of netizens have started not only questioning the veracity but readily probing, if not proving, the apparent untruth behind some of the claimed achievements of the regime, to wit: The ALS already being implemented when Duterte was still a mayor. The 64 airports – made to appear like they were constructed under the Build, Build, Build Program – were actually in various stages of repair, rehabilitation, upgrading. So are the claimed 243 seaports and 2,709 bridges – absent any location, or if even real.

So, it was claimed that the Philippines ranked 49^th in the IMD World Talent Ranking 2019. So, the Philippines too has the lowest IQ in Southeast Asia – scoring 86, as against the 108 for record-setting Singapore – in the World Smartest Cities study of the World Population Review last year.

Aye, to every claim of achievement by the regime, the resounding counter-proof of failure from these netizens.

Instantly finding its way in the web side by side the PCOO infographic of the Duterte Legacy is “the correct, all-too real” if defaced version of it, the so-called accomplishments superimposed with the “actual” failings, to wit: the devastation of Marawi; the P12-B shabu smuggled through Customs; EJK and tokhang; recycling of incompetent, inept, and corrupt officials; martial law in Mindanao; surrender of the WPS to China; POGOs; red-tagging of journalists and activists; persecution of critics; ravings against the Church; misogyny and profanities; culture of impunity; bukbok rice and imported galunggong; the P50-million caldera exclusive to the 30^th staging of the Southeast Asian Games; fake news and DDS trolls.

No game of truth or consequence here. Only the reality of consequential truth demolishing crafted falsity. A legacy of lies and lunacy, as some netizens readily damned the PCOO grand production.

Succinct is one Facebook post: “So much ado about the 'Legacy' when Duterte will be remembered by one dominant issue: FAKE NEWS. That the regime was immoral, apathetic, murderous, thieving & totally corrupt - all sprung from how they manufactured, used and thrived on FAKE NEWS.

The 'LEGACY' is merely their compilation of the FAKE NEWS of "accomplishments" they want repeated and repeated in the subconscious until it assumes the appearance of Truth.

Without FAKE NEWS, the entire Duterte facade is nothing but a recital of regression in the Economy, international standing, and of our democratic way of life.”

That it has to come out midway through the Duterte presidency – too early, as the better Lacson observed – is as much prematurely as preemptively.

Legacy is a judgment of history. Duterte’s minions could not wait for that verdict – ominously damning as it already is. Hence, the haste with which to write their own peremptorily, though twisted as it may be.  

“The evil that men do lives after them…” So, the Bard immortalized. So, it could be of Duterte. As it was with Hitler, as it was with Stalin, and yes, Marcos.

That Marcos Junior is moving hell to rewrite, aye to revise, indeed to pervert this country’s history to glorify his Dictator Senior may not have been lost to Duterte’s sycophants. The PCOO and Medialdea, for sure Panelo too, may even have taken their inspiration for the Duterte Legacy from there.

By coming up with it presently, they may be entertaining thoughts of saving Polong, Sara without the H, and Baste from the same dire straits that Bongbong is now in.   

Ay, the lunacy of it all.

    

Rising from the ashes: E ko magmalun...Agyu tamu

HASHTAGS ABOUND with the Taal Volcano eruptions but we have yet to see any stirring slogan that could serve as a rallying cry for the victims to rise from the dire straits they have been consigned to.

Like what we’ve had in our own Pinatubo experience. That proved beyond doubt their efficacy of motivating, indeed of rousing, of transforming victims into victors. So, we remember anew…

E KO magmalun, mibangun ya ing Pampanga.
The exhortation of Gov. Bren Z. Guiao for his people to end their collective grief, rise from despair, and believe in a renascent Pampanga brought the first ray of hope in the wake of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions.
It was the faintest flicker of hope though, the Kapampangan trapped in the most desperate straits: damned in a wasteland of buried homes and broken dreams, doomed in a landscape of death and desolation.
Beyond PR savvy – of which Guiao was a guru – the slogan was founded on the governor’s unwavering faith in the Kapampangan character: of grit and resiliency, that have served him well in rising from every adversity, be it socio-politico-economic, as in the agrarian unrest, the Marcos dictatorship and the communist rebellion; or natural, as in the floods that perennially devastated the croplands and aqua farms of the province and damaged its infrastructure…
A faith well placed. A prophesy coming to pass. Pampanga indeed rising from the ashes of Pinatubo to use that overwrought cliché. As Bren Zablan Guiao promised. As my foreword in the book Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit (2008) put it.

Agyu Tamu!

FROM OUT of the depths of desolation and despair, a cry – faint at first, then resonant all across the city.

There rekindled some flicker of hope that the city can rise again, if only the people believed in themselves – that, yes: “We Can.”

Summoning storied People Power, Acting Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan led thousands of his constituents to the Abacan River to confront the gravest threat to their very existence: Lahar.

“Pala Ko, Buhay Mo,” the activity was named.

With picks and shovels, hoes and rakes – many with no implement other than their bare hands, the determined populace sandbagged the riverbanks – bamboo stakes serving as improvised sheet piles – in a bid to check further scouring by lahar. It was futile as pathetic an effort, with but ten minutes of lahar flow, not the slightest trace of the day’s work remained.

The determination of the community though gained international respect and recognition, their activity winning for the coordinating agency, the Angeles City “Kuliat” Jaycees, the Best Community Involvement Project in the 47^th World Jaycees Congress in Miami, Florida.

The can-do spirit at the Abacan River thence inspiring and spawning clean-up projects all around the city. Manufacturers joined their craftsmen and artisans in rebuilding their factories to revive productivity. Among the first was Cruz Wood Industries which resumed its manufacture and export of high-end furniture within 45 days after the eruptions.

At Fields Avenue, bar girls and bar owners themselves hosed mud from their dance floors, sprayed the ash off their neon billboards, and opened up even to zero customers if only to perk up the place. US veterans that opted to stay helped in the famous avenue’s clean-up.

The abandoned Clark golf course was literally dug up from several meters of sand and ash by the Angeles City golfers in a team-up with the PAF’s Clark Air Base Command. And made it playable in due time, the constant threat of ashfall providing additional degree of difficulty to their drives, pitches and putts.

So it is clichéd that familiarity breeds contempt. So it was with lahar, the dread and horror it initially brought lost with the advent of heavy rains: its scalding heat fizzled, its viscosity dissolved with the abundance of water.

Lived with lahar, the Angelenos did. And even profited from it. Where lahar flowed – at the Abacan River – enterprise flourished.

With the bridge totally destroyed, passenger vehicles loaded and offloaded commuters at each end of the gap. For them to go down the river and cross to the other side.

Makeshift ladders of all makes – steel, aluminium, bamboo, wood – and sizes were soon ranged against both bluffs of the river to ease the ascent and descent of the commuters – for a fee of course.

To cross the river, commuters had a choice of the “Pajero” – and improvised sedan chair, and the “Patrol” – the carabao-drawn farmer’s cart locally known as gareta. Again, for a fee.

The pumice stones belched from the volcano’s bowels became a principal source of livelihood, a backyard industry. Crushed to golf-ball size, the pumice was used in stone-washing denims. Handicrafts, ornaments, even art objects were fashioned out of pumice rock, among the more familiar were Japanese stone lanterns, ashtrays, religious images – the head of the crucified Christ, angels and cherubs – and miniature jeepneys.

Needless to say, sand quarrying became a principal source of income in the city.

With the sense of normalcy returning to the city, there arose the need to jumpstart the still-lethargic local economy. Thus newly-elected Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan and his confidant, the activist Alexander Cauguiran, brainstormed Tigtigan, Terakan King Dalan.

Grounded on the defining character of Angeles as an entertainment city, the Mardi Gras-like festivity – of street music and dancing, of food and drinks – ably delivered to the nation and to the world: “Happy Days are Here Again.”

A happy beginning

AS THE phoenix birthed itself from its own ashes, to rise, to soar to greater heights of glory, so did Angeles City.

Clark Air Base reborn as a freeport zone. Its airport well on its way to full transformation as the country’s premier international gateway.

Manufacturing abounding.

Foreign investments rising. The Koreans keep on coming. Fields Avenue upgrading.

The service industry – hotels, restaurants, entertainment – rebounding. New ones, like business process outsourcing, aborning.

Shopping malls sprouting.

Thousands of jobs opening.

Greater opportunity spelling prosperity. A promised land of plenty.

More than a happy ending to the Pinatubo story, this is yet a new beginning for Angeles City. 

So went the capping essay in our book Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph (2011).

Pinatubo redux

IMAGES OF Taal Volcano erupting – the billowing grey pyroclastic cloud crisscrossed by sparkling orange lightning, most notably – caused an instant recall of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions to those old enough to have suffered the devastations they caused in 1991 through 1997 – when the FVR megadikes was completed to contain the lahar rampages that buried a number of villages.

Most vivid of the memories was, invariably among the netizens who reminisced on Facebook and twitter, were the initial eruptions. And so we indulge ourselves too in remembering…

ANXIOUS, APPREHENSIVE anticipation of an expected unknown gripped the people of Pampanga in the weeks leading to June 12, 1991.
Like the prophet of old – or the doomsayer, as a number who questioned his wisdom, if not his authority, were wont to deride him – Director Raymundo S. Punongbayan of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology had raised the alarm of the impending eruption. The signs and sounds upland and on the plains were foreboding.
Like the beating of distant drums that precede a conflict, the incessant rumbling sounds from the bowels of Mount Pinatubo rang the certainty of a coming catastrophe.
On June 10, all the roads out of Angeles City were jammed by hundreds of vehicles in the exodus of American servicemen and their dependents from Clark Air Base to Subic where US warships awaited them for their final journey home.
Up in the Zambales mountain ranges, Aetas, like frightened creatures sensing danger, had heard the initial rumbling and felt the unsettling tremors of mighty Pinatubo since April.
Several months back, the Philippine National Oil Company-Energy Development Corp. had drilled three giant exploratory pipes into the area around the slopes of the volcano in a bid to tap geothermal energy deposits.
The mountain tribesmen of Pampanga resented the exploration as an act of sacrilege and warned of rousing the wrath of the volcano’s mythical deity, Apu Namalyari. Thereafter, the tribesmen reported of animals scalded by searing sediments and vents billowing hissing sulfuric fumes.
Pampanga residents proximate to the volcano did not sense imminent danger up to the second week of June 1991, but held their uneasy peace with the tumultuous fear of the Aetas’ belief about their disturbed god.
On June 10, ominous dark clouds enveloped Mount Pinatubo, casting an eerie darkening shroud over Clark Air Base.
The following day, tremors started shaking a wide swath of western Pampanga. There was a flurry of movement in personnel, aircraft, and transport units inside Clark. Save for a security contingent, the US Forces had completely abandoned the biggest American military installation outside continental USA.
June 12, 1991. Philippine Independence Day. There was no nationalistic sentiment in the speech of Angeles City Mayor Antonio Abad Santos that followed the flag raising ritual. He underscored the dependence of the city on the American forces, their abandonment of Clark he lamented as “overacting.” Whatever parade scheduled for the day was rained down – not by cold water, but by hot ash and pumice stones.
At 8:51 A.M., a series of thundering explosions shooting a giant plume of ash rising to some 20 kilometers high broke the 600-year slumber of Mount Pinatubo.
Bursting from the volcano’s crater was a gargantuan gray-greenish cauliflower cloud – not unlike the atomic blast in Hiroshima – that blotted out the morning sun. Volcanologists though recorded the first eruption at 3:00 A.M. and reported an avalanche of pyroclastic materials – searing gas with a temperature upwards to 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot ash and molten rocks – that blanketed the mountain’s lush green slopes in a dark grey shroud…
…With Angeles and Olongapo bearing the first full brunt of the eruptions, the deeply religious discerned the wrath of God in Pinatubo: the rightful destruction of the host cities to the US military bases for the same sins as Sodom and Gomorrah’s.
But the devastation would not remain contained there; even holy sites as churches and chapels were not spared.
Punongbayan described the June 12 blasts as major eruptions but warned that Pinatubo still held plenty of built-up magma capable of more severe eruptions.
“This could only be the beginning,” he said, prophetically. (Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit edited by this columnist and published in 2008 with the San Fernando Heritage Foundation as publisher.)

INDEED, THAT Big Bang of June 12 was followed by the even Bigger Bang of June 15 -- The Great Eruption that turned bright day – starting at 8:15 in the morning – to darkest night. The roll of thunder, the flash of lightning, the rain of ash and stones, and the tremors of the ground foreboding the very end of days.

More eruptions – if lesser in magnitude – followed, compounded by the lahar rampages that trapped the Capampangan in the most desperate straits: damned in a wasteland of buried homes and broken dreams, doomed in a landscape of death and desolation.

The story, of course, did not end in that tragedy but in the ultimate triumph – of the will, of the spirit of the Capampangan. Most manifest in the state of the province today as one of the most progressive in the whole Philippines.

In remembering, we are far from disheartened at the Taal eruptions these days. Confident as we are that the Batanguenos, as we Capampangans, can weather these most trying and desperate times, and even rise, excel from them.

  

Way to discipline

SUNDAY SURPRISE. That social laboratory of street anarchy that is the stretch of Gen. Hizon Ave. at the side of the Metropolitan Cathedral in downtown San Fernando was a showcase of order – no parked vehicles, not even a bicycle, no counterflowing padyak-sikels and motorcycles, no crisscrossing pedestrians anywhere. As well as a spectacle of spanking cleanliness – not even a single candy wrapper, in an absolute absence of garbage.

Ay, puede naman pala.

Monday validation. Press release from the city information office: The City of San Fernando, thru the City Public Order and Safety Coordinating Office (CPOSCO), conducted its regular monitoring and clearing operation around the city public market and sidewalks to tighten peace and order in the said places referred to as “Discipline Zones” on January 06... 

…The “Discipline Zone” is a Philippine National Police program wherein national laws and local ordinances in designated areas are strictly implemented and enforced to promote discipline and ensure adherence to the law. (Question: Should not the whole city, and for that matter, the whole country be considered a “discipline zone” given that it is “national laws and local ordinances” that are being “strictly implemented and enforced”? Banish the thought for now, so as not to disrupt the flow of this piece.)

Prohibited acts inside the “Discipline Zone” are as follows: Overloading, Not wearing helmet, Disregarding traffic signs, Over Speeding, Illegal parking, Smoking, Jaywalking, Littering, Vandalism, Illegal vending along passage ways and sidewalks; and violation of other pertinent statutes.

All Fernandinos are enjoined to adhere to the rules and regulations of the “Discipline Zone” to avoid penalties and sanctions.

Anyone caught violating traffic and public order rules will be sanctioned and meted with fines ranging from P500 to P1000.

At last, at last, at long last, the city government has come to its senses to instill proper discipline among its constituents.

“This activity is one of the city’s measures to elevate the peace and order status in San Fernando. Let us, Fernandinos, be the first to show discipline and order so other cities and municipalities could follow.” So was Mayor Edwin Santiago quoted in the PR. Indeed, sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan. No, it does not take only a Marcos in-tyranny to see this.  

Tuesday, Wednesday affirmation. In pictures posted on its Facebook account, CPOSCO engaged in relentless operations – night and day – against: violators of No Helmet Ordinance (NHO) and tricycles entering Poblacion Area, illegally parked heavy vehicles and violators of NHO along JASA and MacArthur Highway, particularly at Barangay Del Pilar near New Public Market and in front of SM City Telabastagan, tricycles traversing JASA and MacArthur Highway.

Did I just say Wednesday?

Driving with the wife along JASA around 9 a.m. this very Wednesday on the way to Mexico, I followed two tricycles through the flyover and thereafter was joined by three others and two motorcycles with helmetless riders taking all the lanes but the outermost one. All this, in clear sight of at least five CPOSCO enforcers! And a team of Land Transportation Office “flying squads” flagging trucks for some random emission tests!

Instant reaffirmation now of the pessimism thrown by a number of netizens on CPOSCO’s page – Ningas Cogon, Nganga, Sana all…  

From all appearances, CPOSCO is engaged in some cat-and-mouse game with truck and tricycle drivers and motorcyclists – scofflaws born to ignorance, nurtured in arrogance, inured in disorderly conduct.

Aye, the cat is not even away and the mice are freely, fearlessly at play. Which begs the proverbial sixty-four-dollar question, hopefully as yet unanswered in Philippine pesos. Encourage them to be consistent every day and don’t forget to reward them with appreciation. So exhorted the City of San Fernando page sharing the CPOSCO operations photographs.

So, I take heed. Precisely, consistency – plus constancy, fairness and firmness, of course – in the enforcement of the law is the key to achieving discipline – on the road, and for that matter, elsewhere. Impacting this as much to the erring drivers, as to the errant enforcers.