Whistles a-blowin’

The most coveted role du jour seems to be that of state witness, resulting from one’s role as a whistle-blower, and with the way our government officials have been behaving all these years, there is no lack of scams and anomalies that are coming out now in this era of openness and transparency, so there will correspondingly be no lack of people who may want to blow the whistle on such nefarious activities.

Whistle-blowers come in all shapes and sizes, literally and figuratively. But they have one very basic trait in common – they are all guilty, just in varying degrees; they are all crooks, in one shade or another; because if they were not guilty, if they were not crooks, they would have no valuable, inside information worth whistling about. Whistle-blowers are not saints with lily-white robes; everyone – including, or especially, the whistle-blowers – should accept that. They do not come with clean hands; they’ve been participating in wrongdoing, in stealing taxpayers’ money, and most probably benefitting from it – handsomely, I can only assume – so it is an insult to us taxpayers who slave away and have a big chunk of our pay withheld as taxes when they climb on their high horse and pontificate about truth and justice, about sacrifice and “para sa bayan.”

Whistle-blowers are often accused of coming forward just to save their own skin and neck and other body parts. Of course they are; if you believe otherwise, there’s a bridge I want to sell you. A government scam cannot be done by one person alone, and if one party gets caught, the others are probably trying their darndest to stay below the radar, holding their breaths and praying to all the saints major and minor that their names will not be mentioned and their roles – significant or insignificant – will not come to light. And in the event that they are implicated – summoned by subpoena or named as respondent in charges – there is the opportunity to turn from heel to hero: become a whistle-blower and apply to be a state witness.

Having said all that, however, let me now say that whistle-blowers are valuable cogs in the effort to unravel wrongdoing in government and to bring the real crooks – the proverbial big fish – to jail where they belong. Precisely because they are on the inside and directly involved in the shenanigans, the whistle-blowers are in the best position to expose the whole sordid scheme as well as the sordid characters involved in the scheme. It indeed takes a crook to catch a crook.

Redemption is available to the guilty, even to the guiltiest, as long as there is acknowledgment of wrongdoing, repentance and restitution. One party reportedly offered restitution – returning the money stolen – but without acknowledgment (I guess offering to return the money can be taken as repentance?) of wrongdoing. Some of the whistle-blowers, on the other hand, are owning up to their role in the scams, but seem to be trying to hang on to the lucre, or at least part of it. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?