Perhaps it is a human tendency to forget the gravity of certain things when doing them becomes routine. It becomes easy to be desensitized to their implications.
Having documents notarized, for example, has become a commonplace activity especially in the vicinity of public offices. Notaries public set up shop side by side, their staff members processing the documents expertly and efficiently. Every day, in any given office, numerous people avail themselves of notarial services for a host of reasons – from attesting to the originality of works to narrating the circumstances of the loss of an important document or authorizing a family member to transact on one’s behalf. Or narrating one’s version of events in an affidavit or counter-affidavit.
The law says, however, that a notary public “should not notarize a document unless the persons who signed the same are the very persons who executed it and personally appeared before him to attest to the contents and truth of what is stated therein.”
This is brought to light with an impending probe on the lawyer who notarized the counter-affidavit of the dismissed mayor of Bamban town in Tarlac. The lawyer will explain why put his stamp on a document on a day the ex-mayor was presumed to already be on the run. It could only mean that he notarized the document even when she did not personally appear before him, as is required by the law.
Yet another example is the taking of oaths before answering any questions on a public forum.
Taking an oath is simply committing to state the truth, hence the oft-used “and nothing but the truth so help me God.” It is a verbal articulation of something people are expected to do in the first place – tell the truth, whether that person is a “witness” or a “resource person.” Why split hairs? Who goes to a forum intending to spread lies?
The sight of the Vice President remaining seated while her staff members are all standing with right hands raised is jarring. There was mention of the oath being applicable only to witnesses, and since she was not technically a witness, she did not have to take an oath.
Simply put, not taking the oath could free one from the obligation of telling the truth. Or so they think.
What is otherwise a fairly routine step of verbalizing a faithfulness to the truth has become a way to evade questions yet again. For now, and tragically, the focus is trained away from the actual controversies in question: how one could escape the country’s borders without the help of people in authority, and why there is an adamant refusal to account for how the people’s money was spent.
What these gestures tell us is that the reverence for truth is being trivialized in small and big things alike. These are the depths to which we have gone and we hope the succeeding days would tell us this will not be condoned.
