Let’s stop asking people to donate their salaries: Just ask everyone to do their very best

I’m not in favor of this stampede to ask everyone, particularly those in government, to "donate" their salaries, or part of their pay, to help fight our "fiscal deficit". Now, we hear that policemen are being exhorted to donate part of their paychecks, too.

I suspect it’s the "bosses" of the government agencies who’re loudly proclaiming their people are disposed to "give till it hurts" who’re doing the gentle persuasion or the arm-twisting. It’s time to call "whoa" or "pause" to this confusing effort, pa-pogi in some places (perhaps even in Congress), rather than sincere – or, in the end, effective.

We’ll rein in the fiscal deficit, the budget deficit, the national and international debt, and even the moral deficit, if we all did our part – in the corner where we are. If we worked honestly and hard, did our best, paid our taxes, did our duties, and were helpful and generous to each other, we'd really get our act together (For heavensakes, we can’t even drive unselfishly, being road-courteous to other motorists and drivers, and following the rules of the road.) Let’s do away with all the current breast-beating and grandstanding.

I’ve heard Presidents call for "austerity" and "sacrifice" for the past 40 years. It’s an individual act and cannot be mandated – or "volunteered", as when the chief cuts off the air-conditioning in the office to "save", so the money spent on electricity can be put to better official uses. What hypocrisy. And what stupidity.

I’m sorry that many years ago, the Vatican, which sanctifies holy people and certifies them to be "saints", suddenly de-sanctified "St. Christopher" (The Christ Bearer) and asserted no St. Christopher ever existed. In an instant, that wonderful crusade called "The Christopher Movement" went kaput, vanished completely. Why, even the word crusade has even become politically incorrect these days in deference to the Muslim Chechens who massacred those 338 school children and parents (400 are still "missing") in that school of death in Beslan, in southern Russia.

But I digress.

What did the "Christopher Movement" preach? Its organizers said, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." Remember? At the outset, they dramatized the message very graphically. They would switch off all the lights in the room or the auditorium, then ask everyone present to strike a match, or flick on a lighter. (I suppose they had the foresight to distribute matches beforehand, since today the non-smokers are in the majority). In any event, the darkened place – with those matches upheld – was suddenly "bright" again. The Light-a-Candle idea, however, is not new. Even the Bible admonished: Do not hide your light under a bushel.

That’s all the "crisis" requires. Each of us striving to brighten the corner. Where we are. Doing our duty. Doing our best, and inspiring others around us to do the same. That’s the way we become a nation – and how a nation fights its way out of despair, disappointment and dejection.

It sounds almost too simple to be true. Sadly, in the complexity of present-day life, where Alvn Toffler’s prophetic Future Shock has become reality, many of us have forgotten it.

* * *

Before I return to the "moan and groan" type of column I usually spew forth, let me say a few things about my weekend sortie to Cebu which was, unashamedly admitted, exhilarating.

There’s always something which uplifts this old writer in the Cebuano spirit – part of it, of course, nostalgia for my vanished youth. For I was a young man in Cebu, starting out post-college on a career which was to take me far and wide, but always, in memory, back to one of the favorite cities of my youth.

Our Cebu Bureau Chief, Valeriano "Bobbit" Avila, as usual, volunteered to be my driver, bodyguard, over-all supervisor, companion and guide. Bobbit was already rich and successful (owning movie theaters, his wife Jessica running mouth-watering restaurants) when I challenged him 18 years ago to become a journalist.

He’s been with us in The STAR, ever since. He also writes a column for The Freeman and has a popular weekly television show. (In fact, on this trip, he collared me, impromptu, to tape a Press Freedom interview for it, which, I guess, will come out on Visayan TV screens shortly).

For Auld Lang Syne, Bobbit drove me the other night, near midnight to the carbon – which is what "we Cebuanos" (ahem) have called the huge, bustling, teeming marketplace for generations. Right in the heart of old Cebu – right smack, by coincidence, in the neighborhood of President GMA’s newly-opened "Malacañang in the South" – after all, she grabbed the old Customs House by the docks – is this immense market, the "stomach" not only of Cebu but of the entire Visayas and northern Mindanao.

Food items, vegetables, chickens, meat, eggs, dry goods, everything under the sun and under the moon, pour into carbon from the surrounding provinces, by land and sea, to be marketed there. It’s open 24 hours a day. Why "carbon"? They traditionally burned wood into charcoal there, to be sold for fuel, and for, if you’ll recall, those old-fashioned irons (plancha) which great-grandmothers or yaya used to wield to press clothes from the laundry neat and dry.

* * *

In the neighborhood, too, you’ll find the best places to get "pirated" DVDs, etc.

In Metro Manila, these pirated DVDs sell for anything from P80 to P120, depending on whether they’re clear copy or "DVD copy". In Cebu, you can get them for P60 to P70. The peddlers and distributors were "raided" recently. Within a day, they were back in business. I mean, in Cebu.

Same thing in Metro Manila.

Frankly, with due deference to the Americans who are the hottest about cracking down on this piracy of "intellectual property", most people I’ve asked in Luzon and the Visayas don’t give a hoot about protecting US "intellectual property". Those loathsome pirated DVDs sell so cheaply they make movies available to the masa and the middle classes.

My Cebuano pals told me with a chuckle that the recent raid was conducted when our friend, US Ambassador Frank Ricciardone, Jr., visited Cebu to deliver a speech. As a welcome "gesture" to him, the authorities conducted a raid and made a big show about crushing the confiscated stuff under a pison or roadroller, or a bulldozer. Now, cruising around Saturday night, we saw those stalls wide open, doing a roaring trade once more – even near Oriente and along Colon.

After I wrote about the Edu Manzano "raid" on the DVD sellers in Virra Mall, Greenhills, I received a scolding letter from a friend (our former lawyer, one of the few who bravely dared "lawyer" for Ninoy, Pepe Diokno and myself, when we were arrested by the martial law despot Ferdinand Marcos). Former Sandiganbayan Presiding Justice Francis Garchitorena sent me a note, asking, "May I nitpick?" Then he tore into me in his letter for referring to the "Muslim peddlers" of pirated DVDs in the Virra Mall. Why, Francis pointed out, there are "Christian peddlers too", and "Christian bandits", but why do we never refer to them as such? Oh, well. This writer was just reporting a truth. All the DVD traders in Virra Mall are Muslims. I know because I’ve been talking to them for months, indeed the past year and a half – inquiring about their "network", where their stuff comes from, and the various aspects of quality and fidelity to the original. (They also sell pearls, "Swarovsky" zircons or "diamonds", fake rubies, etc. very cheerfully).

Sure, they were even enthusiastically pushing Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, fake DVD copy naturally, as "da best, sir!" (It was a best-seller before Holy Week, as they reminded all their customers.) There’s nothing wrong with identifying the vendors as Muslim, it seems they’ve cornered the trade. (In one place in the market, I found a Christian from Bacolod working for them, but she was the exception.)

In Cebu, I asked who the DVD sellers were, and my informers chorused: "Why, they’re all Muslims, Dong!" So there. As one of the vendors told me the other month: "Sir, we’re traders, not rebels." Who ever said all Muslims are rebels? Some of the worst rebels I’ve encountered used to be Christians, or are atheists.

Enough about this "religious" bigotry stuff.

* * *

Cebu Mayor Tommy Osmeña took us to dinner at a tasty Spanish restaurant, tucked away in Guadalupe’s Fairlane Village. It was the "Arano", since it is in the Ibarlucea ‘Arano’ Residence, and the proprietor, handsomely sporting a moustache, is Angel, a true-blue Basque from Euskadi, no less. Tommy ordered his favorite chicken (which, he grinned, "takes two hours to cook, so I phoned in to order it beforehand) – and four of us consumed it with gusto, "secret recipe" stuffing and all, plus calamares in su tinta, chorizos (no, not from Bilbao), and all. No, Angel, boomed, he didn’t belong to ETA, the Basque terrorist movement – but did admit he was a Basque nationalist.

Saturday night, it was Tourism Secretary Joseph "Ace" Durano’s turn to host dinner, this time at the snazzy City Sports Center – a surprisingly well-marbled, modern, and upmarket sports club (with 1,000 members) right next to my hotel, the Marriott, where Karl Hudson, the genial General Manager, plied me with wine and hospitality.

Ace had gathered some of my Cebu friends to sing "Happy Birthday" (including my old buddy, Rep. Raul del Mar) and it was a jolly gathering altogether. He also invited Arthur Lopez, the country's most experienced international hotelier and tourism expert who happened to be in town attending a board meeting of the Waterfront Hotel, along with my longtime partner, Jun Ventura, the editor-in-chief of PAL inflight magazine Mabuhay.

I think that Ace Durano will make a crackerjack Secretary of Tourism – he’s polite and charming, but – don’t make a mistake – steel underneath. Already the various pressure groups have been trying to impose themselves on him. He smiles at them, promises to "consult" them, but he’ll make up his own mid. That’s the message they’d better get while it’s still early.

Don’t forget, behind that handsome, smiling, wide-open face and Stateside-trained manner, he’s an experienced Congressman (two terms, re-elected to a third) – and a Durano from Danao City. A grandson of the formidable (gun-making) Ramon Durano. They don’t make paltiks, by he way, in Danao any more. Those are real, world-class firearms today being manufactured, complete with serial number.