Debating FM’s legacy

Batas Mauricio

I AM not fond of regularly reading Facebook posts but recently, I chanced upon the post of Luis Zuriel P. Domingo, a nephew-in-law of mine. He is the son of Don Carlo Domingo, the brother of my wife, former Judge Angelina Domingo Mauricio, and Gail Parial Domingo.

His piece was presented as simply as possible, yet I was moved to share what he wrote on the occasion of the 100th birthday of President Marcos. Zuriel, by the way, graduated valedictorian and summa cum laude in Philippine history, not too long ago, from the University of Sto. Tomas, and is now taking up further studies for a master’s degree from the same school.

Still single up to now although he must be only about 22 or so years old, he writes sense, as shown by the following: “Sad, that Filipinos blame the misfortunes of the past only to President Marcos…

“Let’s not forget how President Roxas betrayed the Filipino people through the passage of the Parity Rights and the Military bases agreement; President Quirino whose administration has the biggest controversy of graft and corruption…

“… President Magsaysay won the 1953 national elections thanks to the participation of the Central Intelligence Agency; President Cory Aquino who neglected to answer the problems of the country (poverty and economic dependency to US) for the restoration of ‘democracy’ and the oligarchs…

“I still hope for the Filipino people to be critical in dealing with the events of the past and with the best ability to recognize both the desirable and undesirable deeds of every President/administration…”

Shawn Paul Traballo, apparently a Facebook friend of Zuriel, wrote this reaction: “ Let me point out my stance regarding this statement for academic sake. Let me point out that everybody is entitled to their own opinions. Even the side of Pro-Marcos could have done the same thing to favour their own suppositions about late President F. Marcos.

“On the other hand, I also want to argue that even though President Roxas may have betrayed the nation by passing the Parity Rights, General Relations, Military Assistance Agreement and even the Military Bases Agreement, we cannot entirely blame him for these things, because there is no other choice to do so.

“I even remember when Dr. Resos is lecturing about this during our Diplomatic History class, and he mentioned that these things were for the sake of the massive reparation of the Philippines from the WW2 atrocities, especially the need to borrow money to make this happen. I could’ve done the same thing too. But of course, I invoke my right to academic expression, and I therefore respect your call for critical thinking for all these political issues…”

Migz Jimenez, one the other hand, retorted, in reference to Traballo’s “There is no choice”: “Actually they have. Ethically and philosophically speaking, there is always a choice. They just wanted the easy way out. Even the nationalists will agree on this…”

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It has become highly noticeable that, nowadays, many Filipinos have become so “thick-faced” or shameless and no longer have any qualms in defrauding their fellow Filipinos just so they can earn a few pesos.

This is attested to by messages from the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) which have been flooding the cellphones of many of our countrymen since the start of September 2017. The NTC says that there are, again, many text messages being circulated by unscrupulous persons which say that the recipients of the text messages won hundreds of thousands of pesos in a raffle contest which they did not participate in, in the first place.

The latest text messages in this scam say that the cellphone users won P500,000 from the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., and that this amount could be received from the Pagcor chairman. If the cellphone users are duped into believing the text scam, they would then be asked to shell out money, allegedly to expedite the release of the raffle prize.

I already wrote about this kind of a scam before, in this column. For the benefit of everyone, here are parts of that column, once again: “Life must be very hard nowadays that many Filipinos seem to be having no other option to earn money but to dupe, or perpetrate fraud, or even outrightly commit robbery, against their fellow citizens.

“The latest case in point is the email circulating in the Internet saying that jobs are available from the Stevenson Memorial Hospital, Fraserhealth, or City Adventist Hospital, all in the US.

“Administrator Hans Cacdac of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (Poea) said that his office received a clarification that the email is spurious or fraudulent, because these three companies are all denying they have available jobs for anyone. What is worse, however, is that the email is asking all interested job seekers to pay P3,000 to P5,000 as application fee, so they could already be deployed right away.

“In the same vein, there are also a lot of other emails and cellular phone text messages notifying the addressees and the cellphone owners that they have been chosen to receive huge amounts of money, in dollars and pounds yet, or that they won millions of pesos, either through a raffle or a lottery of some sort.

“Yet, the email addressees and the cellphone owners never at any point joined any raffle or purchased any lottery ticket. Surprisingly, however, many are still enticed to respond, and, much to their regret, later on find out that they were duped into sending either cellular phone loads or money supposedly to be used for processing the prizes to be given to them.

“The key here is this: those doing these scams know that many Filipinos are too greedy for sudden riches, and could therefore be easily victimized. Consequently, if we don’t want to be victimized, we should not even pay any attention to anything that says we won or are entitled to so much money…”

E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com