Exasperated

I have a few friends who feel the retired colonel Panfilo Villaruel should be lionized. I disagree with them.

But I can understand the minor clamor to do so.

In our culture, we magnify the good in those who have died. We diminish their faults. We echo their kind utterances and forget the error of their deeds.

I do not know Panfilo Villaruel intimately. Notwithstanding, I will sympathize with those who say he was a kind-hearted and passionately patriotic man. I could very well sympathize with his visions of a better country for our young and his denunciation of the evils that plague our society: the culture of corruption that seeps deeply into the fabric of our community and the destructive politicking that kills dreams and poisons governance.

Villaruel’s exasperation is not unique. But his final act of articulation, his final method of advocacy, violated the core of what we expect government to be and what we always complain our government lacks: a decisive predisposition to effectively and swiftly restore order at the moment it is threatened.

The retired colonel, more than anybody else considering he was chief of the ATO, should have understood that the NAIA Air Traffic Control Tower is probably our most critical facility. It is manned by highly trained people 24 hours a day, each day of the week.

If the tower is rendered inoperative, we could have planes scrambling in the air without direction. The possibility of air accidents rises. The danger to life and property will be immense.

There is no comparison to the Oakwood Hotel in this case. We could have allowed the mutineers control of a hotel for days without inviting the grave danger of accidental deaths in horrifying numbers. But we could not have allowed our air traffic control facility immobilized for more than a few hours.

Villaruel and his sidekick took control of the tower shortly after midnight and was finally subdued about four hours later. That was an eternity, considering the critical mission of this facility. No amount to force used to dislodge the illegal occupation of this facility at the soonest possible time could be justly described as "excessive."

Politicians will make the usual noises about this tragic event. They will summon our air security people to long hearings. They will try to twist this tragedy into yet another partisan carnival and try to reap political profit from crucifying those who did their jobs courageously and well.

That is a prospect we are doomed to endure.

But through all the din the politicians make, let this message not be snowed under: In a strong government, no political pranks that put the lives of citizens in danger will be tolerated. Anyone who occupies a vital facility to use it as a platform for demagoguery of whatever sort will be wasted.

We have progressed a great distance from that sad day when coup plotters were made to do push-ups as penalty for their opportunistic adventurism. That is the good news.

It is tragic that passionate patriots should be wasted like those two fine officers were early Saturday morning. But it is a tragedy that should not have happened in the first place if that insane occupation of the tower was not done.

For days and months and maybe years, we will continue wondering if last Saturday’s tower occupation was part of yet another bungled conspiracy to take power by force. We have not lacked for zealous men who have managed to convince themselves they are messiahs, expecting people to rally to their cause the moment they make one bold move.

Such zealousness has, in the past, already precipitated tragic bloodletting: beginning from that sad day when Valentin de los Santos, leading a phalanx of fanatics, marched down Taft Avenue to take the Palace by storm armed only with bolos, chants and amulets.

Since that sad day nearly four decades ago, the nation has had to deal with this recurrent nightmare of otherwise well-meaning but disoriented men, powered by blind faith in some millenarian vision, marching on the seat of authority with possibly valid grievances and with mesmerizing chants.

It is in this context that Panfilo Villaruel is allegorical.

We are a nation rife with exasperation with a colorful tradition of investing heroism on tragic men who defied the odds and died trying to do so. We are a society made vulnerable by the mistakes of the past and laced with fractured visions of what we could become. We are a community replete with romantic men who think they can reverse, in a single stroke, all the historical failures we have inherited.

And so we are constantly on the brink of yet another tragedy such as we witnessed last Saturday morning, when our sleep was aborted by breaking news of yet more valiant men spitting into the wind, venting their frustration by courting chaos and addressing us through the barrel of a gun.

We may not have seen the last of this recurrent nightmare.

I remember vividly, during the Erap impeachment crisis, in one of the discussion sessions leading to the establishment of Pagbabago@Pilipinas, Bart Guingona stood to deliver a pained and moving dissertation nearly amounting to a soliloquy. We live in a society, said Bart, where the best among us are constantly thwarted.

Thwarted by a government that is largely inoperative and by a political culture that brings out the worse in us. Thwarted by an irresponsible oligarchy and a perforated bureaucracy. Thwarted by a popular culture driven by the least common denominator. Thwarted by a whole host of attitudinal codes that cripples those who excel and attempts to destroy those who succeed.

And on the poisoned earth of distrust and disillusionment, of a cultivated disdain for authoritative institutions and a propensity to seek out what divides us rather than what unites us, men like Panfilo Villaruel grow up hopeful and grow old disillusioned. In the autumn of their lives, they march out and die for lost causes.