Feeding the filled, starving the hungry

BY PET MELLIZA/ THE BEEKEEPER

 

It is just baffling how government could spend money repairing functional roads in Iloilo City while neglecting those in need of one.

 

The sides of Luna Road, formerly “McArthur’s Highway”, the stretch fronting San Agustin University and the Iloilo City PNP station, doesn’t need repair at all but is now being wrecked by jackhammer preparatory for reconstruction.

 

Another road, also named “Luna” from La Paz to Jaro undergoes the same activity. It sides are being punched with holes from hydraulic jackhammer and abandoned indefinitely until such time that the contractor decides to repair them. For the time being, the wrecked sides of the road slow down traffic flow.

 

In our ordinary thinking, only roads in the state of disrepair, which is aplenty in Iloilo City, ought to be repaired but what we see and lament is that,  scarce resources are being squandered on streets that need no repair at all, like what is happening now on both sides of Luna Street. It’s like feeding the filled while starving the hungry.

 

The least that we can describe it is: it’s as crazy as crazy as the act of a psychotic of a public official named “Boy Angsot” peeing in the room of his subordinate.

 

When your bladder calls, go to the rest room, not in the office couch where Boy Angsot relieved himself. The rest room is just a spitting distance from the office where Boy Angsot plied his trade.

 

The associate had reasons to suspect it was the handiwork of Boy Angsot because she happened to be in the same room herself minutes after the latter made the mess of wetting her bed sheet on the couch and the floor of her office one fine Sunday morning. And she did it right in reporting the incident to the security guards, and later the police.

 

She also reported the incident but Dr. Jekyll, the butler who was supposed to investigate, just opened his big mouth without thinking declaring that henceforth, to avoid a similar incident, nobody was allowed to bring blankets to the office for sleeping purposes.

 

In effect, Dr. Jekyll declared the hapless lady at fault, absolving Boy Angsot in the process,  because she brought in her blanket. Had she not done so, Boy Angsot would have not done what he did. In other words, the lady was at fault because the blanket that she brought was the one that tempted the psychotic to unzip and wet everything on sight in her room.

 

In effect, Boy Angsot the psychotic is being reinforced to repeat his deviltry again, again and again, pardon this repetition, because another sick man protects him. I know this rascal back in our media days. That’s “reporma kag pagbag-o” for you, my foot!

 

All major roads in Iloilo City has been reclassified “national”, which means, their maintenance rests mainly on the shoulder of the national government.

 

In other words, the City of Iloilo is no longer the principal agency in charge of keeping them. That’s the outcome of the industry of Rep. Jerry Trenas who claimed he authored some 36 bills, all of them enacted into laws, converting specific roads of Iloilo City into national properties.

 

Had the irrepressible Roding Ganzon, been alive these days, he would have given Trenas the name the latter deserves similar to the one that Ganzon did to a rival.

 

The “Stormy Petrel of the South” simply christened the man “Congressman Apa” (“mute”) who authored no bill or law other than the one renaming an elementary school after his relative in all his six years of office before Raul Gonzalez Sr. unseated him.

 

For those unfamiliar with Iloilo politics, Raul Gonzalez Sr. once served as legal officer in the office of Ganzon in Congress and later, Senate.

 

Gonzalez has son, his namesake who also got elected to Congress in 2004 through 2010. Trenas beat the junior in the 2010 elections. The junior is running again this time to wrest back the seat from Trenas.

 

In public gatherings, Trenas calls his challenger “PPP” to mean “pungko, pamati, pauli” (sit, listen, go home”). Gonzalez Jr. in turn presents six laws of “national application” that he authored and lashes back at Trenas as “PPPP” to mean “pungko, pangihi, pangawat, pauli” (sit, urinate, steal and go home), in an apparent dig at Trenas’s problem with his diabetes.