Oh my gulay!

IBy MAGINE the Presidential Security Group as farmers planting pechay, tomatoes, mustasa, kangkong, then imagine them doing it in Malacañang. Is there something weird about this picture?

That was exactly what happened last Monday, when their Commander-in-Chief inaugurated a 500 sqm “Hardin ng Lunas” (garden of healing), signalling an urban harvest after a mere 40 days. Quoting PSG Group Commander Brig. Gen. Rolando Joselito Bautista, it’s a project that will teach the PSG “how to make green leafy vegetables part and parcel of their diets, gain knowledge of their nutritional value, and develop the skills to maintain a semi-organic vegetable garden.”

“Good deeds cost nothing,” Gen. Bautista said, one good deed being that their crops will be shared with Hospicio de San Jose, poor families living around the Palace, and, as charity begins at home, PSG’s dependents.

Looking pleased as punch, Digong praised PSG’s DU30-voice choir and their sponsor/choir master/cheerleader Dr. Isa Cojuangco Suntay. “They did very well,” he said, whether it was the planting or the singing (in colorful peasant costumes). Inspired by the sight of the veggies growing in neat rows a stone’s throw from the firing range, he told the beneficiaries -- and the world outside the garden walls --that the release of 400 political prisoners “is only possible after successful talks,” but in the meantime NPA rebels could learn how to plant and produce food.

“My mother,” he said, “established Boys Town and taught them to plant,” and “whatever were the faults of Marcos, he was an enterprising president” who made Masagana 99 a national movement.

Are the President’s guards ready to replant? After the beneficiaries ripped through the veggies like a super-typhoon, “magtanim hindi biro” sounds like something to chew on.