After Listening to President Aquino on EDSA Anniversary Mass

Thanks, President Aquino, for sharing to us your juvenile thoughts when your father was killed and tossed. I was watching the television that lunch time of August 21 when the tube went blank, but news of your father’s assassination has hit the airwaves, and I saw my own father’s face, his concern, his sadness. My father told me about your father’s genius and gift of gab, and together, my father and I listened to that one rare moment when from prison, he was allowed an interview, and gosh, he outsmarted his interviewers, including that Sri Lankan Ronnie Nathanielz.

Of course any one of us would very much like to avenge a senseless act of violence for a loved one, but as you reminded us, that is not forgiving, that is not the way to peace, not love at all.

I have done my best to listen to you, as you are my President, Now I will put my total trust in you on this Bangsamoro Law, because you are right, peace begins with us.

And as St. Francis would pray…..

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life

On Mission Exodus and the Magnificent Forty-four.

The dead tally stands at forty-four, reason for a nationwide highly emotional hoopla, President Aquino receiving the severest criticism: first, for a fault called failure of operation, because bashers contend that if it was a success, there would not be 44 lives taken from their loved ones, and second, for a no-show at the arrival rites of the lifeless and shattered bodies of the magnificent troopers in metal caskets, draped by Philippine flags, and to which I surmise that the President was still in a state of shock, even if he was putting up a brave front at a car show in Laguna, and please, presidential spokespersons,do not undermine the people’s intelligence by saying he was getting through scheduled events, how lame an excuse is that, because a president must be first in line when his troops come, dead or alive. The people would have understood it more if someone said he was sick, and we would have understood that he was shaken. Wrong advice, ES Paquito Ochoa, to shelter the President by sending him to the car show.

The President met with the families privately, and spoke on prime time television two times. Not once though did he defend himself, not even when the legislative houses turned into spectacles, especially the lower house called congress, where the representatives reduced their house to much of an agora, no offense to market vendors, please.

But today, the honorable senators are mum, after executive sessions that invoke secrecy. Chairperson Senator Grace Poe is explaining that no cover-ups will be made so the President might be saved. There is no such thing, Senator Grace, forty-four dead means the mission was lethal. That was why the best and the bravest were sent there, because it was impossible to get out alive, Those men knew the Mamasapano gauntlet meant their demise, and they faced it. Mission Exodus was more than saving face. Mission Exodus was saving our country from far more ghastly scenarios, saving our families from whining and wailing in lamentation.

The valiant forty-four will forever be heroes in our history books, and their beings forever etched in our hearts.