EDITORIAL - Is that us speaking?

The death of journalist Lourdes Simbulan in a traffic accident and the prison privileges enjoyed by former Batangas governor Antonio Leviste are two separate and unrelated matters. But a common thread weaves through the fabric of both cases.

Both received inordinately swift and dogged responses by authorities not because the cases were particularly jarring to public sensibilities — even if in fact they were — but on account of who the people involved were.

Fatal accidents resulting from reckless driving and double standards in dealing with law offenders have always jarred our sensibilities. Things would be a lot better in this country if crazed drivers are kept off the streets and the law is made to apply with equal force on anyone.

Unfortunately they are not. They proceed to swirl around our lives with such regularity we have grown inured and calloused to them. We have come to unconditionally accept them as part of the daily grind.

But what makes things really worse is not the ascendancy of the topsy-turvy but the selectiveness with which we react to the topsy-turviness. Had Simbulan not been a journalist and Leviste not an ex-governor, it is very doubtful if their cases would make the headline news. 

While reckless driving claims many lives daily, the death of a media colleague drove the whole of Philippine mediadom into such a hue and cry that no less than the laid-back president of the land felt sufficiently agitated he had to issue a direct order to get the missing driver.

And while jails and prisons in the country are so porous the only thing that stays confined in them is the humid stench the privileged occupants leave behind, it is different when the obvious becomes vulgar. Everybody sits up when magic is explained or mystery defined.

Crazy traffic is easy to miss. Double standards are hard to pin. But sometimes, of our own choosing and in our own time we decide to get scandalized. In sanctimonious anger we beat our breasts, as if we were innocent and did not know. And tragically, we actually believe ourselves.