8/23/11

Should you say sorry if you stepped on someone's foot?

Imagine yourself inside your grade 1 elementary school. You are the designated OIC - officer in charge - of the class while the Teacher is away. You still have your homework to do so you try to do both tasks at once.

Suddenly, a ruckus develops and your classmates are fighting over who has the most papers in one's intermerdiate pad. You ignore the noise so you can finish your homework.

The noise escalates. The group becomes more rowdy. You ignore it some more. A classmate records the scene in his celphone. The group hams it up for the celphone camera thus causing more noise and rowdiness until a classmate starts crying because someone spilled Zesto on his brand new socks. You approach the crying classmate to shut him up. He won't. You stomp your foot to make your point but you accidentally step on his. He cries further and demands an apology. Would you say sorry?

It was a rowdy room, everyone was being their worst. Surely, someone has stepped on someone's foot before, not just in this classroom but in other classrooms in other schools.

Should you say sorry at all?

Unfortunately / Fortunately, there are far worse problems than this, such as

The Manila Hostage Crisis Apology.

The only way the survivors and families of the Manila Hostage Crisis could get the government's apology is if they hold their own hostage-taking and demand it - though that still does not mean they will get their way but they can try.
Being non-locals, little do they know that the Philippine government cares little for its own citizens so

DILG Sec. Jesse Robredo implies: "Who are these foreigners to say that we should apologize to them? And what did we do that we should apologize for anyway?

We dont even apologize to the shit we make our countrymen go through everyday. So who are we to apologize to them, they are not even from here!"

In this context, he is being fair.

He - and PNoy - also said, shit like this happens everywhere, so there is no need for an apology. Look at Norway, PNoy said. A deranged gunman killed 70 people. "There were less casualties in the Manila 2010 Hostage, yes?"

True.

But there could have been none if PNoy or Robredo (in Robredo's own words of admitted regret "went to the scene earlier") were conscious enough to act what the moments called for -- alertness and intuitiveness, NOT passivity.

The Norway Tragedy was NOT a hostage taking incident. No demands were issued. No opportunities were given by the Norway gunman to the Norway government about him surrendering.

PNoy and Robredo need not fog or manipulate or confuse our already CO2-polluted brain.
They need not tell us that 1 + 1 = 3. We know our Math.

What the PH government and its authorities blatantly, obviously did - for all of the CNN-watching world to see -- was wait for a magical Deus Ex Machina or Bruce Willis.

Their reaction to the Manila Hostage Crisis is what their reaction is whenever there is a storm, a powerful Intertropical Convergent Zone, rain or flood attacking the country --- they suspend classes after students are already in schools.

They make sure they act whenever it is fashionably late to do so.

And PNoy and Robredo know they could have done better. And they didn't and wouldn't admit to that fact because their egos won't allow them. This is so obvious the BBC could not help but detail what the authorities should have done for our benefit.

PNOy's non-admission is so telling of what and how his mindset works that the country has to consider this as a glaring precedent of what the Philippines is to expect from the NoyNoy Administration until 2016 -- nothing at all (maybe except frustration).

As usual -- and as what happened during the Manila Hostage Crisis -- the frontliners stepped up to the plate because no one in higher authority wanted blood on their hands. "No one wanted to take the lead" Bernardo Espinosa, a SWAT police officer interviewed in History Channel's documentary on the Manila Hostage Massacre said, "so we had to."

It is from their group too via Chief Inspector Romeo Salvador who had the guts to actually say what PNoy and Robredo can't: SORRY.

PNoy's reaction now to the Manila Hostage Victims and Survivors call for an apology is probably his exact reaction during the actual hostage-taking --- a head-turning-looking-away denial whilst saying in his head:

"This too will end without me doing anything."

I have a feeling this is what he is saying now and until his term ends on 2016:

"This too will end without me doing anything."



But beyond sorry, it is not even PNoys non-apology that reeks of non-accountability.

He said he already said sorry by expressing regret


and then takes back what he said when he stated this week that,


NO he will not apologize.


Ano ba talaga kuya? May isang salita ka ba? Alam mo ba sinasabi mo? Sure ka ba? Sure ka na ba? Sure na sure ka na ba?


PNOy is a person that doesn't have a single word under his name - in Tagalog,

isa siyang taong walang salita.

I respect his position as president,

but I don't respect this dude as a person.


Why did you guys vote for PNoy again?

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