Last night, I came home from work and my two yayas announced that their husbands had asked them to come home. It was a bit upsetting because they are both doing exceptionally well in their tasks. They’ve been hired only a couple of weeks so the thought of finding replacements is already causing me alot of stress. Anyway, I was doing a lot of thinking and it occurred to me how the yayas could still ask to resign when they’re doing a good job when the one person we have been asking to resign, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t even budge from her seat. She even had the gall to spew rhetoric in her oh-so-irritating, mix of nasal and overbite way of speaking: “Ako lang ang pangulo, walang iba…” and the most idiotic presumption: “The world will not forgive an EDSA 3 in 2008″.
Makes me think, what does the world gotta do with EDSA revolution? We are a sovereign country and our problem is a domestic problem that only we the citizens have the solution. Did she think they would even care? The Philippines is not the world and vice versa and non-filipino citizens have respective countries , with respective laws and political conflicts to worry about. Meddling in our affairs is simply unthinkable to them and I just couldn’t believe my ears when I heard her say that, in a religious mass nonetheless. What was she thinking?
But going back to my yayas and their relevance to the current political crisis. I had an interesting thought this morning while on my way to work. At home, I have a very strict policy on cheating, lying and stealing. When either of these three are committed and they are caught, they are automatically fired.
Same thing, elected officials are public SERVANTS. We the people put them where they are now as vice-president down to the brgy kagawad. They run for office, asking us to vote for them and if they win, they enjoy the power and privilege of their positions at our expense.
Bottomline, we the taxpayers of this country pay for their salary ergo we pay for the food they eat, travels they take, clothes they wear, and cars they drive or their drivers. In short, the power is in our hands. If we could fire our servants when they cheat, lie and steal, isn’t it just proper to do the same to our public servants?
We don’t owe them squat, they owe US. They owe us clean and honest governance. They owe us better educational system, better health service, better roads, and better programs for the poor and our kababayans in the countryside. They also owe us their accountability, their transparency, and their loyalty. That’s what they are there for!
I believe this is not too much to ask, but only proper and just to expect from these public servants. Let’s stop thinking that we owe them because we don’t. Since we are paying for their salary, it means they are working for us. And it’s true from the President to the Brgy Kagawad.
Now, my dilemma is: Can we fire an official when she’s not even elected?
[...] I came across this blog entry and I was reminded by my previous entry here. A parallelism can be drawn because if you really think about it, arrogance has no room in public [...]