Correct voice! But

As early as my elementary school years more than half a century ago, I learned two things about Benjamin Franklin. In my youth I did not know that he was among the most influential intellectuals of his time and one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence. Although, I heard FIRST of his very famous scientific discovery that lightning was electrical by flying a kite during a thunderstorm. Such experiment led him to invent the lightning rod for buildings. The SECOND was the saying "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" which Franklin popularized. There was even a melody which my teacher then, the late Mrs. Decula Abrea, wove around that proverb. Yes, in our youth we sang it energetically.

I went to bed early the other night, as Benjamin Franklin advised. But at midnight, I woke up from my sleep to sip my regular midnight cup of coffee and scrolled my cellphone for a lack of a better thing to do. It was then that I was kind of startled by a lightning of sort. It was not a giant spark of electricity in the atmosphere between clouds, and certainly not the lightning involved in the experiment of Benjamin Franklin. It came in the form of a vocalized indignation of a Retired Brigadier General Virgilio Garcia. Honestly, I have neither heard of his name nor seen his picture until the other night. I did not know which service - Air Force, Army or Navy - was he a part of. But, in that social media post, written on the face of Ret. Brig General Garcia was total anger.

The retired general spoke in Tagalog, a language which I cannot comfortably use in conversation. Yet, Garcia became Franklin’s lightning rod when he said in his opening line “sa panahong ito, isa lang ang kalaban natin. Ang mga mandarambong. Ang mga magnanakaw na mambabatas.” Mine

might be a flawed translation but that was an acceptable sweeping generalization that the general made - “plunderers. thieves. lawmakers”. They are our enemies. His voice was apparently correct!

I fully agree with Brig. Gen. (ret.) Garcia, when he mentioned flood control projects. He was rightfully angry to have heard enough narratives as children being swept away by raging floodwaters because such projects were either ghost projects or substandard. Garcia might not have said that President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. himself opened this anomaly by exposing the top fifteen contractors who cornered billions of pesos supposedly paid for these ghost projects but he had all reasons to feel betrayed by budgetary insertions made by lawmakers themselves. Garcia, in his vitriolic social media post, might have forgotten the Discayas. He could have been more enraged to recall that the Discayas, using people’s taxes, reportedly purchased a forty million pesos plus Rolls Royce simply because they liked the umbrella which was an adornment of the car.

While Garcia aired a correct indignant voice against massive fraud, I do not understand his direction. Here is the BUT in the title of this column. Senator Panfilo Lacson, in two privilege speeches went on to provide details of this unimaginable corruption. In the legislative investigations conducted separately by both houses, Congressmen Martin Romualdez and Elizaldy Co, Senators Francis Escudero, Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada, ranking officials of the DPWH, and private contractors were named conspirators with still unspecified participations. Garcia though seemed to ignore the flow of the information. In his post, he expressed a suspicion that Senator Lacson is covering the trails of corruption. When he asked Senator Lacson “how much” and hinted that the lawmaker received bribe money in order to try to protect the corruptors, his angry voice became misdirected. His bark, instead of uniting the cause of the wronged Filipino nation, tends to break further our fragmented stands.