Jessica Soho recently featured in her show a footage of what went on in an elementary school classroom during a test and the teachers weren’t around. That cheating took place was not surprising. The number of students who cheated was surprising, nay, revolting.
Most of us, at one point or another in one’s life, have practiced some form of cheating. It could be cosmetic, like overstating (or understating) one’s age. Or calling in sick with LBM when it was actually the lazy bug that hit your bowels.
Some “smarter” ones cheat differently, overstating votes and bloating government procurement prices by the millions (of dollars).
I am no saint, but I don’t think I cheated in grade school or high school, but confess to having a codigo once or twice during Math 100 class in college.
It was fear of retribution, on earth and in heaven, which stopped me from being a cheat. When the risk of being caught and punished is great, you will think twice, thrice; even when you have rationalized to your conscience that, what the heck, everyone else was doing it anyway. Once in a while, it is good to feel guilt gnawing at your conscience.
It really starts from grade school, and it doesn’t help any when children see cheaters get away with corruption, and when the richest people in the neighborhood, especially if it is a provincial neighborhood where mansions really stand out, are those who work in government.
That government officials cheat is not my opinion — it is a fact stated by the World Bank, which estimates that P30 billion annually is lost to corruption in the Philippines.
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Is integrity the most important quality of a government official? Should a government official remain honest even if doing so may mean impending crisis? These are the themes that are explored by Nelson A. Navarro in a biography of Emmanuel Pelaez, former vice president during the administration of Diosdado Macapagal, senator and congressman for several terms and Philippine ambassador to the US from 1986 to 1992. ‘What’s happening to our country? The life and times of Emmanuel Pelaez’ was launched recently at the Manila Polo Club by the Emmanuel Pelaez Foundation.
Written by journalist and political commentator Navarro, the epic provides an intimate account not only of the statesman whose political career spanned the Magsaysay, Garcia, Macapagal, Marcos and Aquino eras but also of the key personalities of those periods.
Navarro, who was a First Quarter Storm activist and a University of the Philippines student leader, provides an interesting glimpse of the pre-Marcos era when “for one brief shining moment, (Emmanuel Pelaez) stood as the nation’s one great hope against the coming Marcosian darkness.” In the months prior to the Nacionalista convention where political upstart Ferdinand Marcos wrested the presidential nomination, Pelaez was the “acknowledged frontrunner, way ahead in the delegate count,” recalls Navarro.
Pelaez’s fatal mistake was that he had entered into a gentleman’s agreement with Marcos not to resort to fraud or buying the votes of the Nacionalista Party delegates, according to Navarro who has written columns for leading dailies (including the STAR) and served as political commentator for CNN, BBC and other foreign news agencies. Pelaez kept his word despite Marcos’ mockery of that agreement. Even as the vice-president’s aides urged him to make use of the contributions that had poured in from backers bent on seeing Marcos defeated at all costs, he wouldn’t budge. As recounted in the book where history is retold as passionate narrative, Pelaez’s unwavering answer to frantic campaign advisers and financiers was: “I would rather be right than be president.”
Throughout the rest of Pelaez’s career as congressman and senator in the ’60s and early ’70s, as an assemblyman from 1978 to 1984, as fierce crusader against the controversial coconut levy, and as President Aquino’s man in Washington during those tumultuous years, Pelaez would often recall the convention and other defining moments in his life when he paid a stiff price for defending his political integrity.
The Navarro volume finds relevance today when the integrity of the country’s highest officials has time and again been questioned and has become cause for persistent political destabilization.
The book is the initial project of the Emmanuel Pelaez Foundation which is dedicated to projects on good governance, environmental conservation and poverty alleviation. The foundation, launched on March 17 at the Manila Polo Club, also spearheads reforestation efforts in Northern Mindanao and has been instrumental in the preservation of trees that are over 100 years old and rare plant species in the same area.
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During the launch, which was attended by figures from all colors of the political spectrum, the Pelaez family distributed bookmarks of a print of Anita Magsaysay Ho’s oil painting Washing of the Feet. The book tells us why, in Pelaez’s own words:
I remember many things about Father John Delaney, S.J., but what stands out in my mind is what I have heard him say to a group of students whom he was advising on what career to pursue.
“If you are after personal advantage, if you are seeking personal and material success, then public service is not the career for you. Public service is an apostleship of sacrifice and service. You must use it to give of yourself unsparingly in the service of your people, not to make something for yourself.”
Then he gave me a piece of advice that burned itself into my mind: “If I had my way,” he said. “I would put in the office of every public official the picture of Christ washing the feet of the apostles to remind them that even God went down on his knees to serve his fellowmen. This must be the symbol of service for all public officials.”
One day, Magsaysay-Ho noticed a print depicting Christ’s washing of the feet in Pelaez’s office. He explained to her its symbolism and some time after, she presented him with her own interpretation of Christ’s humble act that was Pelaez’s inspiration.
Pelaez’s thought it most fitting to share prints of the painting as bookmarks, for don’t bookmarks give us our bearings and lead us where we want to go?
(You may e-mail me at joanneraeramirez@yahoo.com)