Have we no shame?
SORRY to go back to the tanim-bala controversy but it’s become truly shameful and scandalous. Because of the callousness of opportunists and the utter ineptness of our airport authorities, unsuspecting travelers are traumatized and inconvenienced.
Have we no shame anymore? Innocent people fall prey to the extortion schemes of soul-less employees who mulct from harried passengers who are forced to fork over some of their hard-earned money due to no fault of their own.
It’s a scandal, and airport authorities are so dumb and ineffectual, they have no idea how to stop it. President Aquino has allowed his subordinates to make him look stupid for too long.
The way I see it, from news reports and media interviews of unidentified airport staff, there may be two parallel operations at work. One is random petty extortion by small-time and small-minded airport staff who see an opportunity to make small change from travelers (barya-barya, we might call it).
Airport staff surreptitiously insert a bullet in a traveler’s baggage and then blackmail him or her into giving the staff money so they’d let him or her go. This is penny-ante stuff. Barya-barya, as I said.
The other operation, if the unidentified airport worker interviewed by TV Patrol’s Zyann Ambrosio is to be believed, is a big-time extortion scheme that targets rich-looking passengers. It’s the same modus as the penny-ante operation but the extorted amounts are big, ranging from R30,000 to R80,000.
There’s no longer any doubt that there’s extortion going on at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (there’s seems to be very little or none at all at the smaller airports).
What is hard to believe, as I’ve written in an earlier column, is that airport authorities, especially at the higher level, seem to be clueless about it all.
Why does it take a lot of investigating to find out? Airport authorities haven’t found out anything definitive as I write this. Why haven’t the airport authorities cracked the whip on their employees to find out the truth behind this mess? (A task force report is said to be due out this week.) And why hasn’t the President given his subordinates an ultimatum to solve and stop the extortion with the punishment of dismissal if they fail to do so?
But what should really curdle the blood of every decent Filipino is the way we Filipinos prey on our own countrymen. (Ideally, of course, no one should prey on others, whether they’re fellow Filipinos or foreigners.)
Have we no compassion for innocent and hardworking people who sacrifice their lives in foreign countries to earn a living? How can we even think of burdening these people with the inconvenience, lost earnings, travel delays, and trauma from this experience? If they had any conscience, how could the perpetrators watch the news and the Senate hearing about their scam without feeling guilty?
We are a people losing our way. There is simply too much crookedness going on in society. The crooks don’t ever stop. Whatever happened to our sense of right and wrong, to our empathy for poor people trying to make a living, and to our very souls?
Forget about what the outside world will say about us. What about what we say about ourselves?
*** Calling on Customs boss Bert Lina and Philpost chief Josie dela Cruz (2). In my last column I flagged an inexpensive item I bought on eBay auction that’s on its way to me from the seller in Hong Kong. I’m requesting Mr. Lina and Ms. dela Cruz to please alert their people to make sure the item doesn’t disappear en route to me. Thank you.