The danger about public apathy

MANILA
The hottest news here is the expose of a spider’s web of scams allocating congressmen’s pork barrel funds for “ghost” projects, with the actual money going into the private pockets of fraudsters. As the name implies, ghost projects are non-existent, they only appear on paper but not on the ground.
The problem is that the public don’t seem to care about this massive plunder of public money.
Have we become immune to shock? Where is the outrage over the recent epidemic of criminal activity?
The alleged systematic raid on legislators’ pork barrel funds is
mind-boggling in its scope, said to have netted P10 billion in a span of a decade. But it’s only the current sensation. We’ve had a long history of plunder through various methods.
For example, past military comptrollers are on the dock for stealing hundreds of millions in soldiers’ money. A “fertilizer” scam, similar to the current pork barrel fraud, is still pending in the courts. The so-called “Euro” police generals were caught in Russia flush with bundles of the European currency. A senator’s wife was caught last year carrying large undeclared amounts of dollars in the United States (the same senator is said to have allowed his pork barrel used in the scam of the moment).
The list can go on and on to reveal willful ways of cheating, stealing and fraud, like the fielding by bus operators of unlicensed vehicles or multiple units bearing duplicate license plates and the shenanigans at our entry ports, which allow the entry of illegal commodities or under-declared goods, costing the government billions in lost taxes.
Street crime has been on a rampage in metro Manila and other cities. Recto Street in downtown Manila, notorious for the peddling of bogus school diplomas and other fake legal documents, has lately become known for petty criminals who snatch people’s jewelry and other valuables. Jeepneys and buses are held up even in broad daylight, their passengers divested of their belongings (as I write this another such holdup had just occurred along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, metro Manila’s main thoroughfare).
The Abu Sayyaf, a bandit group in Mindanao, kidnaps for ransom, and sometimes kills, hostaged people, many of them innocent and have nothing to do with the armed group’s avowed cause. The Communist New People’s Army rebels do the same, terrorizing the rural populace or extorting money from political candidates. Members of the police force are regularly accused of looting crime scenes, or are often involved in crimes themselves.
These are willful crimes, meaning their perpetrators knew their acts would be detrimental to others or to public welfare.
We Filipinos know that our money is being stolen through various ways. We know that large portions of money for projects like roads, dams and schools go into the pockets of crooked politicians. We know that contractors and suppliers give back portions of project allocations to those in the approval chain. This practice gave the lexicon the infamous word “kickback,” later deodorized as “SOP,” from the bureaucratically benign “standard operating procedure,” to denote that the kickback is part and parcel of doing business.
In the pioneering days of American settlers, especially in the virgin West, fortune-seekers used to exult: “Thar’s gold in them thar hills!” Some of those early homesteaders did find gold, but most of them had to toil long and hard to eke out a decent existence.
In the Philippines, the more clever among us yell out: “Thar’s gold in them government projects!” And all they have to do to get their hands on the “gold” is to know where the money is. Then they find out whose signature is needed to get the money released and they corrupt the owner of the signature or bypass him altogether and just forge his signature.
The pork barrel scam has been playing prominently in the news here but there’s been no uproar among the broad public. If anything at all, people display a knowing grin, the equivalent of: “Tell me something new.”
We’ve tolerated, accepted and ignored the widespread plunder as an integral part of public life. Politicians join government to steal from the public treasury. They’ve made a milking cow out of government.
We know it but we do nothing about it. We’re a curious people in that sense. We accept that politicians will steal from us and we just look away as long as the same politicians throw table scraps our way every now and then. We don’t mind them stealing as long as they’re there for us when we need a waiting shed, a basketball court, a water pump, and a godfather for our child just so we can brag to our neighbors that Mayor or Congressman is our compadre. We’re so easy to please and fool.
Are we really so indifferent about all the plunder that’s going on? Or is our seeming nonchalance a manifestation of our helplessness against the powerful?
More than being forgiving, most Filipinos feel powerless to do anything against their officials, whom they see as untouchable. Most Filipinos would rather be quiet and just go about their business than to raise a howl.
But the thieves in government and their accomplices shouldn’t push their luck too far. When the people, as tolerant and meek as they may be, are unable to find redress for their grievances, they eventually rise up in anger.
It took them a long time but they did it with dictator Ferdinand Marcos. They didn’t waste much time in doing it with the clueless President Joseph Estrada, and were close at times to doing it with Estrada’s accidental successor, Gloria Arroyo (whose unlamented retirement proved the people’s extreme dissatisfaction with her).
What is more dangerous is that absent mass public action against erring officials, private scammers and snatchers and holduppers, small groups or even just individuals may act on their own. Frustrated people may take the law into their own hands and mete justice outside conventional means.
This is the danger here. Already there have been killings and bombings that show signs of vigilante-ism, where the motives of the perpetrators couldn’t be clearly ascertained. Other possible forms of public retaliation against government or police inaction could be vandalism, looting sprees, arson and anarchy.
The public’s acceptance of the current administration as one that genuinely attempts to banish the corrupt from government may be serving as a safety valve against mass dissatisfaction, thus the lack of indignation among the people over recent news of systematic stealing of public money.
But if all the noise about investigating the current pork barrel mess, other scams, and street or home crimes comes up empty, with no one being punished and jailed, then our government officials should start worrying about a really frustrated and angry people.