Blame game nation

Man at the Market

Jesse E.L. Bacon II

10/23/2009

Two widely publicized incidents, one in the field of sports and the other inside a posh shopping mall, elicited varying reactions that miserably missed the forest for the trees.

The security guards on duty at the plush Greenbelt 5 mall in Makati when a group of heavily armed men barged in Sunday and robbed the Rolex watch store at its second level ended up being blamed for what had happened.

But an objective cursory of the facts of the incident shows that the hapless guards were no match for the firepower of the heavily armed robbers clad in police uniforms.

Did the police and the public expect the guards to repulse the robbers using their service firearms that in all likelihood were “paltiks” or homemade? And sadder still is the uncalled for reaction that even merited an editorial of a national broadsheet blaming the police security escorts of Taguig Mayor Freddie Tinga for engaging the robbers in a shootout that resulted in the death of one of the robbers.

Perhaps the writer of that broadsheet’s editorial forgot a provision in the country’s penal laws penalizing policemen for failing to do their sworn duty in preventing or repulsing the commission of a crime in their presence. What the two escorts did was simply to perform a duty that their badges had mandated. They happened to be in a place where a heinous crime was being committed thus their natural reaction to repulse its commission.

As policemen, the two were not covered by the mall’s no-armed-confrontation policy in its premises. They were policemen paid with taxpayers’ money to put their own safety on the line if only to prevent the brazen commission of a crime right before their noses. I personally would not be happy if the two policemen just hid themselves under the table while a crime was being committed.

Both should be hailed as heroes instead of being publicly crucified for what they did. It’s the height of stupidity to put to task the two for their heroism. It should be the entire police organization that should be put to task for that robbery. Their sloppy intelligence work enabled these robbers to stage their daring robbery in a plush mall in Makati’s commercial and business district at that.

Unfortunately, police officialdom is not accepting any blame for the surge of daring crimes such as the one that happened at Greenbelt 5 last Sunday hence they are now blaming everyone except itself for the incident.

And similar to the police in the Greenbelt robbery incident, the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) management team is not about to accept the blame for that daring act of professional basketball player Wynne Arboleda of mauling a fan for verbally abusing him. I am no fan of Arboleda but it did not sit well with me also that the professional league’s managers had a heyday penalizing the former for his unacceptable behavior where they are equally to blame for such incident.

Even if I whole-heartedly agree that Arboleda should be sanctioned for his unsportsmanlike behavior, I would like to see the PBA management equally sharing the blame, if not the penalty, with Arboleda. It is the management’s sole responsibility to see to it that the players and the spectators behave accordingly during basketball games under its auspices. I don’t think that the fan mauled by Arboleda had the license to provoke any player that he dislikes through verbal assaults.

If the PBA managers were only up to their job, they should have called immediately the attention of the fan for him not to continue with his heckling of Arboleda for in so doing he is just inviting trouble for himself. But nothing of this sort was ever undertaken by the PBA managers led by its commissioner, Sonny Barrios. Truth is, if I were Barrios I would have tendered my resignation instead of meting out the penalty on Arboleda for I did not possess the moral ascendancy to mete out such penalty for my failure to do my job as the league’s main enforcer of its policies.

But the reaction of the authorities in the Greenbelt and PBA incidents just mirror the Arroyo administration’s penchant to blame everyone but itself for anything untoward that happens to the country. Should we then expect more from others if this is the kind of leadership and management that Mrs. Arroyo engages and indulges in?

(Reactions to jelbacon@yahoo.com)

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