Feel The Pinch, Please!

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, corruption is defined as a dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers). Here in the Philippines this word is very widespread, as long as there is a running hierarchy of leaders. The minds of every Juan automatically think that the top rankers are corrupt. This corruption regime is a blindfold in which we got used to the darkness. We feel hopeless that we will never resolve such a crime. As time ticks off the clock, our fondness to change and resolution decreases.

We are like numb persons, that every touch of hope of change we never feel, that every bites of ants of everyday crimes we can’t feel its pain and itch therefore we don’t mind to scratch it to ease the irritating sensation, and that every pinch of emancipation we never recognize, we never sense, WE CAN’T SENSE IT therefore we are not awakened by the sudden jolt it brings.

 “After all that pork barrel noise in Congress, why is no one in jail? The Ampatuan massacre — why, after four years, there is no court verdict? The daily murders —many of them are unreported”, as stated in one of F. Sionil Jose’s articles. If this corruption thing is always not resolved nor justified, what more the other ordinary crimes that needs a speed of justice could be?

This article also gave me a throwback of corruption days. “How brutal did our history brought to us, simula pa lang pala may corruption na!” I told to myself while reading it. There are these collaborators or linta who does everything for them to have comfort lives, while others who can’t have the chance that these leeches have are trapped in a discomfort life and tries everything to survive.

That’s why Filipinos don’t feel the rising economic status of the country, because before the fund will be felt by the people below, it was luxuriously felt first by those on top, therefore causing poverty, another reason to corrupt. I think even the politicians who corrupt experiences poverty or maybe they don’t want to experience such a thing. Is there such a term like “corruptor” for those who corrupt? Isn’t he also called a “thief”? Like those who experience poverty and was washed out with options and that they chose to steal?
A Spanish writer Salvador de Madariaga stated that a country need not be colonized by a foreign power — it can well be a colony of its own elites and leaders. And this is what we have become. But isn’t it that all problems have solutions? What could be the solution to this numbness? Or maybe who? I believe in this article, WE - the Filipino youth, the next in line, are going to be the doctors who will heal the peoples’ inability to feel so that they may respond to the itch, irritation and the pain of corruption, and also to the pinch of freedom.