A bullet is planted, and a fusillade of criticisms is reaped. A bad few may have done the planting, but it is the good many who are now at the receiving of the broadsides from a nation gone ballistic.
That’s the situation at the airport front. Instead of guilty individuals being singled out, whole institutions are being bombarded, razing the reputation of the innocents.
They are now lumped together as “taga-airport,” a sort of scarlet letter which invites scorn even if their job is not to X-ray luggage nor heave bags into carousels.
Never mind if one works in a tower, landing a tight procession of planes at a pay a fraction of what ex-colleagues who had migrated to other countries get. Never mind if one is a blue guard who works rain or shine to untangle the endless gridlock of cars.
Never mind if one is a Customs man, the honest breed who automatically waves through overseas Filipino workers with their stacks of balikbayan boxes, and even greets them “Magandang gabi po” with a smile. Never mind if one is a minimum wager who scrubs the dirt off decades-old tiles of toilets built a generation ago.
For a public whose anger can never be nuanced and whose condemnation can sometimes be wholesale, they all belong to the same rotten institution.
Rage can sometimes blind. But if one only sees red, reality is the first one that gets blurred.
Yes, our anger must reach boiling point over the hurt done to the Oppressed Filipino Worker who didn’t know that she had a munitions factory in her bag, but not to the point that it melts reason that every porter we now see is a mulcter, every baggage inspector a planting enthusiast, every guard in cahoots with a taxi with the fastest meter in town.
I can imagine how hard it is for frontline airport workers who are in their stations at the break of dawn only to be met by suspicious glances and conspiratorial whispers simply because they have been profiled as “taga-airport.”
We may not know it but to be suspected of being part of a syndicate by people you honestly serve is one emotional injury at the workplace that is hard to repair.
It is for the likes of them, and I believe that they are the rule than the exception, that authorities should get to the bottom of things, where, by the way, low-lifers reside, and name and charge tanim-bala practitioners.
By ridding our airport of them, we also cleanse whatever stain which has bled into the lily-white reputation of the far greater many.
But removing the bad requires uprooting the conditions which tempted them to prey on the hapless in the first place. Scratch the surface of a government racket and there’s always an incredulous law beneath it. Extortion industries breathe through legal loopholes
In the case of the tanim-bala, Sen. Ralph Recto said the gap could be a provision of RA 10591, or the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act.
Possession of one bullet or a truckload of bullets carry the same punishment: six to 12 years in jail. As Recto explained, a jeepney driver who was found to have displayed a live bullet as an ornamental hood and a jeepney driver who transported thousands of rounds face the same penalty.
“So how can this be refined to accommodate gradations in the gravity of the offense to include a policy of reprimand kung isang bala lang?” Recto said. In his view, decriminalizing the possession of one small calibre bullet removes the source of temptation.
I think Rep. Roilo Golez has a very commonsensical answer. While Recto prescribes the lengthy route of amending the law, Golez says airport screeners can just be ordered to adopt a “seize-and-go” rule.
If it’s one bullet found in a luggage then throw it into the trash bin and let the passenger pass, according to the Golez solution. But what about a solitary live bullet displayed as souvenir in a sari-sari store shelf? Can the owner get a get-out-of-jail pass, too?
If there’s one good thing about the tanim-bala controversy, it is that it has planted into our collective consciousness the need to improve our airports. The bullets-in-bags issue has opened Pandora’s box.
Social media are crowdsourcing the cures. There are calls to festoon airports with CCTVs. Others have pointed to other festering ills like the lack of taxis or the abundance of ones with F1-fast meters. What about the luggage being opened or when opened lack missing items? That’s one recurring thread.
Another area of concern is the traffic to the airport, meaning cars, not to mention the traffic on the airspace above. Is a new airport on the horizon? Where? So we can shift the national conversation from bullets in bags to bullet trains to wherever it will be built.
In the meantime, let us focus on the doables, like the spare-no-one investigation ordered by the President, the suggestion to a put up a presidential complaints desk at Naia, the protocols to be observed when opening a suspicious luggage.
And not to forget the stern warning to policemen that planting bullets is rewarded with a lifetime vacation to the Bilibid country club.
Government should do these fast so that when the throng of balikbayan arrive for the holidays, they would not bring bags tightly wrapped like Christmas gifts.