Urgent need: Restore honesty into our lives

MILIEU OF LIES: Watching the televised legislative inquiries into large-scale diversion of public funds, one is appalled by the lies being allowed to pollute the air and be inserted into the congressional record.

The audience and the interrogators cannot immediately discern the lies from the truth, so we are sometimes misled into making conclusions based on wrong information. Names are ruined and lives sometimes offered in surrender.

That the person testifying is sworn to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth” does not help, because all of us operate in a milieu that has forgotten about good old honesty. It seems that a Filipino now has to lie to survive and get ahead in this cruel world.

Adding to the distortion, although the inquiries are supposed to be in aid of legislation, some lawmakers fail to resist the temptation to play to the gallery and the wider audience watching on TV, to earn publicity points.

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INFO FLOW IMPEDED: At the conclusion of an inquiry, the difficult task of winnowing out the chaff of lies from the grains of truth falls on each one of us. But we are not ready, nor are we equipped, to conduct our own reinvestigation just to get to the truth.

With the lies and bad faith littering the path to the truth, the free and full flow of information is thus impeded and the integrity of facts filed is placed in doubt. It becomes difficult to separate the innocent, the guilty and those somewhere in-between.

This is one of the reasons why many legislative inquiries end up being inconclusive. Sometimes no respectable committee report is even written out.

The impossible task of sorting out the truth from the lies is also one of the reasons why many criminal cases do not prosper, or that the guilty are freed and the innocent convicted.

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BACK TO HONESTY: There is an urgent need to drill back honesty into our heads as Filipinos.

There should be a well-studied multi-level campaign to restore or teach us honesty. Now and then I see TV ads (e.g. Milo) reminding us, especially children, not to lie, not to cheat, not to steal.

These attempts to restore or repair values are commendable, but they are isolated random moves.

For optimum results, somebody should put together a sustained and integrated multilevel campaign for honesty. Civic groups, reputable firms and advertising outfits may want to get together and work on this.

As for us elders, we must admit that at times we have been bad examples to our children. It is not too late to make up for it and start anew.

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LAWYERS’ ROLE: Witnessing the excruciating process of extracting honest statements from witnesses who are either lying, holding back or peddling half-truths, we realize how easier the process could be if everybody would just tell the truth and let the heavens fall.

At this point, I want to say something for which a potent sector will surely hate me. Despite the requirements of due process, I wish we could ban lawyers from ongoing investigations and inquiries.

There should be only one advice to everybody, to witnesses, to so-called resource persons, and also to investigators — TELL THE TRUTH ALWAYS!

Lawyers’ clients should not be taught how to lie, prevaricate, obfuscate, tell half-truths, or selectively forget facts. I repeat, the only advice needed by anybody testifying or giving a statement is to tell the truth, the whole truth.

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JUST TELL THE TRUTH: Of course we cannot ban lawyers altogether. But I insist on suggesting it, if only to emphasize the destructive role that some of them sometimes play in obstructing justice and frustrating the search for truth.

But suppose the information being elicited may incriminate the person? If he did not do anything wrong, there should be nothing to incriminate him. And if he did anything wrong, justice demands that he pay for it and not be able to pass responsibility to others.

His honesty, his candor and his penitent confession will be credited as a mitigating or even an extenuating circumstance. This is better than lying and be forever hounded by one’s conscience.

I repeat, this is just a suggestion. If we have to discuss it, please leave out personalities and ad hominem.

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SETON PRESIDENT: A Capampangan who studied and taught at UP Diliman before he made his mark in the academe and fiscal management has been installed the 20th president of Seton Hall University, a private Catholic university in South Orange, New Jersey.

He is Dr. A. Gabriel Esteban, 49, born in Manila to Lita Munson-Esteban from Paniqui, Tarlac. He is the first Filipino to become president of an American university and the first layman president of Seton Hall.

To install Esteban, Seton dropped its requirement that its president be a Catholic priest. The board of regents said of him: “His commitment to academic excellence and the University’s Catholic mission along with his strong Catholic faith make him the ideal choice to lead (Seton Hall) into the future.”

Seton is America’s first diocesan university and the oldest and largest Catholic university in New Jersey. It has nine schools and colleges with an average enrolment of 10,000.

Esteban attended Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and completed the Japan Management Program at the Japan-America Institute for Management Science. He holds a PhD from the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Irvine, an MS in Japanese Business Studies from Chaminade University in Honolulu, and an MBA and a BS in mathematics from the University of the Philippines.

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