Working for the cause of the greater good

Now that Chinese New Year is done, as well as Valentine’s Day celebrations, it is time to get back to the unfinished tasks of running a country, one of which is bringing to justice those responsible for the deaths from irresponsible gun fire during the New Year’s Eve revelry.

While there have been others who had died from stray bullets, the media focused on seven-year-old Stephanie Nicole Ella, a bemedaled grade one student from Caloocan City, who was watching fireworks with her family outside their home when the accident occurred. They covered every step of Stephanie’s battle for 38 hours to stay alive, before father Jay Ella told doctors to stop trying to revive her. “She has suffered enough,” he told them, “We just want to take her home.”

Her death brought about an outpouring of messages, coverage of the wake, the child’s last day, her favorite toys, her hobbies, as visitors commiserated with the family’s loss. A P2M bounty offered by President Noynoy Aquino hoped to speed up the prosecution. A month later, the father was still optimistic the case would be solved.

On Boy Abunda’s The Bottomline, we caught mom Elaine constantly on the brink of tears. It was Jay who kept the faith, answering every question. Because the case of Stephanie had become a celebrated one and because the media covered every step of her fight for life, the situation brought focus on whether there should be a total gun ban and whether the penalties should be harsher.

Boy wondered if there were death threats. Jay answered there was a motor rider bearing a sign “mag-ingat.” Were they afraid? Yes, while repeating they would not stop until justice had been served. At whom are they angry? At the law for allowing it to happen. How would the killer be punished? He should serve a jail sentence. Shouldn’t it be life imprisonment? Jay stopped to think, then admitted, shaking his head, “What if it happens to me? What happens to the family left behind?”

More than any other media coverage, this show revealed the humanity of a man, a thinking and responsible father who had been wronged. We thought to ourselves how difficult it must be to think of others in the midst of despair. This is why we always wait up to the wee hours for Bottomline and Boy who knows just the kind of questions to ask to reveal what is normally hidden. The lesson we learned from Jay Ella is that the cause of the greater good should triumph in the end.

Sometime ago, we attended a Valentine pow wow from Cynthia Villar, who is running for senator under President Noy’s power alliance of Liberal Party, independents, Nationalistas and former political rivals. For this, the president has suffered being thrown brickbats for consorting with the enemy, not only in Villar’s case, but also that of Trillanes and others thought to have jumped ship for convenience.

However, during the few minutes the former congresswoman spoke, it was already apparent to all what a help she would be to the alliance. Sitting in front of us, without the aid of a Powerpoint and other gadgets, she gave a brief of the Philippine situation. Health, she said, is our main problem, which should be attended to. She would re-introduce in congress the creation of a department of OFWs to give attention to the millions working abroad often subjected to mistreatment. For a country 70 percent agricultural, we should also concentrate on how to help the farmers, she stated.

Today, the former congresswoman is very much exposed on television with Misis Hanep Buhay, an advocacy program bringing jobs to the barrios. We have been aware of this program since visiting Las Piñas for a lifestyle story on her home of 35 years. Over lunch then, she spoke of having put up the Villar Foundation in 1992, rehabilitating the Las Piñas-Zapote rivers of water lilies, discovering in the process the garbage stored at the bottom and turning these into organic fertilizer made available to the farmers. We took home her book Saving a River, Securing Livelihood relating the ways and means of mining waste into products. And this was way before the Hanep Buhay TV exposure.

Our point, therefore, is that there are times when the enemy is but the shadow of ourselves, our own interests, our own problems. And like Jay Ella, what’s important in the long run is to serve the cause of the greater good.

(E-mail the author at [email protected].)