As the nation was held hostage the whole day yesterday by a scene (?) from the nation's capital, local and international news media scrambled to cover the drama. Only in the Philippines.
Here are the things I observed/experienced:
1) I got the news from Inquirer.net, but CNN beat the local media by posting a clip on their site. How is that?
2) The hostaged children seemed to be oblivious of what was happening. I saw from the late night news how they waved and smiled. The hostage-taker did a good job at telling those helpless kids that there's no commotion going-on, while outside their realm, the drama and excitement was causing a lot of anxiety.
3) And was i surprised to see politicians of panoplyic colors try to invade the scene? Definitely not! Who would let a chance like this passed them by. Insufferable!
4) Oh, and after releasing the children, scenes from hospital showed more Filipinos smiling and waving on camera. There was no trace of trauma that could have suggested a humid day of life imitating telenovela. (I remembered my socio prof telling us that it is a unique(?) Filipino trait to smile and waved in front of the cameras even in dire situations).
5) That the hostage taker has a grand history of taking the limelight -- in public.
Armando Ducat Jr : Loony or Hero, 2 sides of the same coin
He palpably brought attention to our country's perennial problem of education, and implicitly the condition of the common tao. It also brought in an opportune time how government officials, both career and elected, mangled the kind of services they provide their constituents. Well, I won't blame a single administration for this hell that we are right now. Everyone contributed to the decay of our nation. And they cannot figure it out who to point their fingers on. Corruption has taken its roots deep into our national psyche. Weeding it out is up to us. We could rant about it until kingdom come or do something ... like voting wisely. LOL.. Going back to the topic. Mr. Ducat is a hero -- for the poor, the needy, and the loony.
On the other hand, Malacañang might have been fuming hot. With all the bad attention/publication they were getting, now came a hostage drama exposing how bad our education system. And how bad the security in Manila is to have a bus-full of school children getting hostaged. Headache for the country's spokesperson and apologists indeed. The feather of our country's elite has been ruffled once more. Cursing how 3rd world we are, and how bad it would look internationally.
What happened yesterday would surely be in the news for this week. And it added flavor to the rather dulling political/campaign season. And the week after next, nobody remembers. Not even the summer heat could have etched the lessons from this event. We are creatures that evolved to have short-term memory loss and short attention span.
