Equal responsibilities

The essence of laws is concretized with vigilant enforcers and responsible abiders.

We have so many laws. These are created to avoid chaos.  Oftentimes, people keep on complaining for their poor implementation or weak enforcement.

The government should..

This agency should..

That person should.. They should.. etc. etc.

There’s no doubt that these are sometimes helpful. Especially if such a pointing makes our officials realize their defections. However it is sometimes unfair. We have government with a responsibility to administer and execute laws but without cooperation from the people, laws would never yield order. Looking for specific instances is so easy.

“No Loading and Unloading” but lots of vehicles stop where those signs are as if they don’t understand it. Some traffic enforcers or officials are not even bothered. Sometimes, the passengers are the ones who need to be lectured.

Yellow lights are supposed to be warning for the drivers to watch out for the red light. But instead of making those reckless drivers to slow down and stop eventually, it triggers some of them to adjust their speed to faster rate.

One could see a pile of garbage below a sign saying, “Bawal magtapon ng basura dito.” In addition, fines are imposed for those who will not obey. Nonetheless, this is still ineffective.

These are just simple but some of the instances in which laws are poorly implemented due to negligence of the government officials and non-cooperation of the public. I say negligence of the government since appropriate punishment for violators tend to be so lousy. Such cases are rampant and apparent and yet until now solutions are still hard to attain. The public also have roles. The problem is that we have numerous laws but people are quite lost. Such laws have been in their existence for long time. I don’t know if the reason behind is lack of understanding or merely ignorance.

However, there are those localities where these observations do not necessarily apply. Stricter implementation of rules and regulations, which is obviously facilitated by strong political will of the officials and citizen cooperation, characterizes those particular areas. These could be effective panaceas for this problem. For sure, the end goals (peace and order) behind creation of laws could be achieved.

The effectiveness of laws therefore depends not only on the enforcers but on the people as well. – Aizza Gonzales, BA Political Science, UP Diliman