Coping with terrorist scare

THE Department of Foreign Affairs has cautioned Filipinos living in at least two countries in Europe to refrain from making unnecessary trips outside. The advice to stay indoors came on the heels of two separate violent incidents in Berlin where a truck plowed through a crowded market, killing at least a dozen and injuring many others, and in Ankara where policeman shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey.

This is the second time the terrorists used a truck to mass-murder innocent victims in Europe. Last July 14, another truck rammed through hundreds of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France killing 86 of them.

We were in Europe four days after that act of senseless violence and the tension was palpable especially in France and in neighboring Belgium which, only three months earlier, suffered from three coordinated terrorist suicide bombings.

In fact, it was in Brussels where I experienced my first and hopefully last terrorist scare while having lunch outdoors near the city's main plaza. We were enjoying Belgium's famous mussels when the waiter motioned for us to move indoors, explaining to my son-in-law that it was for our safety. On our way inside, I saw several policemen and soldiers, all heavily armed, arriving.

We would later learn that they were looking for an Arab-looking man in a coat that had a wire protruding from one of its pockets. It turned that he was a university student who was out measuring the radioactive level in Brussels as part of his study. That something as innocuous as the dangling end of a wire should bring about such frenzied police and army response showed how Belgium was on edge.

It was prudent of the DFA to ask our citizens in Germany and in Turkey to stay inside and out of harm's way but is there really such a place that is safe from terrorists nowadays? These people are like flies in that they're everywhere but while flies cause only inconvenience, the terrorists bring death.

What makes them really scary is that they seem to believe that killing the innocent promotes the nobility of their cause and that the more they kill, the nobler they and their advocacy become.

Scarier still that they are already here. A few weeks ago, the United States and the United Kingdom warned their nationals to keep away from at least three towns in southern Cebu where they feared a terrorist attack was forthcoming. Before that, our own authorities said as much, although they couldn't point out which part of the province was likely to be hit.

Talks of such an attack have since died down but the worry remains. We have two big celebrations coming up, three if you include the New Year. But Christmas and the Sinulog are when Cebu is crowded the most and terrorists are known to flourish in crowded places.

But we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by our fears otherwise, the terrorists shall have already won. Why give them that satisfaction? We will all die anyway. Mayor Tomas Osmeña clearly outfoxed the Team Rama-dominated city council in the land swap issue. In signing the agreement with Gov. Hilario Davide III without waiting for authority from the city council, the mayor put the councilors on the spot. He also showed who's boss when the council ratified the contract.

But the council managed to pull one back by constructively abolishing a number of plantilla positions at City Hall by refusing to fund them in the 2017 budget. That effectively tied Osmena's hand from filling up these positions.

The game of one-upmanship continues while we continue to suffer from bad roads, uncollected garbage and horrendous traffic.

But we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by our fears