EDITORIAL - Sad commentary of our times

Maybe it is providential that Cebuanos finally decided to terminate the services of Joy Young as vice mayor of Cebu City. Now Cebuanos can have a new vice mayor who fully understands what the job entails. And Young can devote his time fully in the service of his real master.

When Mayor Michael Rama left for a vacation after winning a second term, Young as vice mayor stepped up to the plate as acting mayor, as a matter of procedure. And only as a caretaker, meaning Cebuanos expect garbage to be picked, streets to be swept. Nothing more, nothing less.

But what is clear to most people is apparently lost to Young. For no sooner had he assumed the duties of caretaker than he promptly reversed Rama's order clearing a fire-stricken area in Ermita.

Anybody with enough common sense and propriety knows a caretaker does not and cannot reverse his principal. He may disagree with his principal and he may be right in his disagreement but it is not within the ambit of his limited power to change things in the principal's absence.

As bad as Philippine politics is, a temp undercutting the CEO is simply unheard of. Yet when asked if he consulted Rama when he reversed the mayor's order, Young snapped “Why should I” or words to that effect.

What a sad commentary it is about his person that Young, after all these years, should remain clueless about what caretaker means in the hierarchy of responsibilities and what the demands of an electoral mandate are as opposed to the orders of a political patron.

This is the problem with Young and all the other otherwise promising political material who chose instead to stay under the wing of a demanding patron. Having stayed for so long under a self-serving and arrogant tutelage, these promising talents emerged stunted and compromised.

What was Young thinking when he reversed Rama? That Rama will tolerate the reversal? The greatest disservice a public official can do to his constituents is to hang them upside down from a policy pendulum and leave them spinning in the wind. But then, not that young cares, of course.