What are they good for?

Herbie Gomez

LOCAL chief executives who suck up to the President by hailing his martial law declaration and its subsequent extension up to  Dec. 31, 2018, should return the millions of pesos in discretionary intelligence, and peace and order funds which they took from their respective local governments. Their assertion is that martial law made their cities, provinces and towns peaceful and orderly.

Then what the heck are these local politicians good for? What are the governors and mayors for if, despite all the public funds at their disposal, they cannot keep their territories peaceful and orderly without martial law?

The same applies to the barangay chairpersons, the police and military. If the only way cities, provinces and villages can become “peaceful” is through martial law, then we, the Filipino people, must have been paying incompetent people for many years for nothing. They are inutile then, and their peace and order funds and other related budgets are useless.

But c’mon! All that is really needed is serious and no-nonsense law enforcement. Equip and make our law enforcers function the way they should so that they can make crime or lawlessness a highisk undertaking.

They don’t really need martial law to set up police or military checkpoints. The Army and the National Police have been doing that for years without martial law. The problem is on sustainability because days or weeks after every attack, laziness sets in. Haven’t you observed that each time a checkpoint is set up, those manning it just don’t or can’t keep up? Yes, ningas kugon. That is why we are seeing unmanned checkpoints now.

Following the crosseyed line of argument that martial law spells peace and order, then why not expand the military rule from Mindanao to Visayas and Luzon or make martial law perpetual? But at the rate things are going, it’s likely to happen especially after the movement for a revolutionary government went pfft.

The water in the pan is slowly boiling, and many people don’t even know that the nation is being cooked alive.

It’s an oversimplication to even suggest that it is merely a choice between strengthening public security or hurting the business and tourism sectors a bit. But public security measures can be stepped up even without martial law.

Our senses have been numbed. There is so much desensitization while efforts aimed at deodorizing martial law — or military supremacy over civilians — have somehow succeeded.

We seem to have forgotten Marawi, and that there were hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings there… families… elderly… children… Yes, just like our children.

If you say it is okay for you to see Maranao children suffer so that your children in Cagayan de Oro can feel safe and secure, then you, Sir, are selfish. Someone should tell you that the world does not revolve around you, and you are not the center of the universe.

Has it occurred to us how that would affect the children and what they would become as a result of what happened to their families, homes and neighborhoods?

Families would need to start all over again, and that is not going to be a walk in the park. And what about their means of living?

Martial law’s collateral damage? Oh for crissakes, we are talking about an entire city and hundreds of thousands of human beings! Pastilan.