Betrayal of public trust

The comedy of errors in the maintenance of our mass transport systems is really quite a tragedy. When breakdown becomes the general rule, government only succeeds in transporting the masses to stages of heightened stress and anger.

Take our light rail transport. On an almost daily basis, the MRT surpasses expectations. Even Murphy’s law has never been more severely tested. And, don’t look now, the LRT, with its own “open door” debacle, has broken into the top 10 playlist of unbelievables once dominated by the MRT.

The quality of a country’s transport systems is a benchmark for competitiveness. Metro Manila is not the only Asian metropolis to be burdened with a dense population. Bangkok, for example, has been wrestling famously with its own traffic demons, seemingly forever. But when it comes to management mishaps, we are clearly a regional leader.

Epic fails. Apart from the light rail woes, the bus and jeepney systems are in constant turmoil, both in regulation and operation. Waterway transport has never really left the port.

When our leaders fail to reliably provide us with even the most basic services, it undermines our confidence in government.

Another undeniable government responsibility, however limited the government funding is for health services, is the provision of immunization to the general public. Thought to be too esoteric, the grounds that factor in to the decision matrix for mass vaccination is hardly different from that of most other government programs. How did it go so terribly wrong?

Not though the soldier knew. Someone had blundered. Next week, Congressional investigations kick off the series of inquiries into this Dengvaxia fiasco. Apart  from the Executive Department, our prosecutorial agencies have also served notice. A nation waits for answers to yet another gross example of betrayal of public trust.

Can anything be worse than when we, in an unforgiveable collapse of diligence, put our own children in harms way? Unlike the soldiers in Tennyson’s Light brigade, our children have no sworn duty to obey orders without question. Yet here they stand, at risk for having followed us blindly. 

Just wars. Speaking of blind obedience, General John Hyten stirred up a tempest when he stated last month that he was not going to carry out an illegal order to fire nuclear weapons. Hyten is the head of the US Strategic Command a.k.a. the General in charge of American cyber capabilities, missile defense and nuclear weaponry. He was responding to media questions in the context of the heightened hostilities between his country and North Korea. This was long before the latest NoKor ICBM launch which covered the farthest distance ever over the Sea of Japan.

Not surprisingly, the statement was reported as having a defiant tone – the usual term supplied by the papers was that the General would “resist” an illegal order. There is truly no love lost between President Trump and his media.

What the reports did not center on as much was the reality that redundancies are in place to ensure that the US President, possessed of the unilateral power to ignite a nuclear war, can only order armageddon after the proper channels and procedures shall have been followed. “The Law of Armed Conflict has certain principles -- necessity, distinction, proportionality, unnecessary suffering – all those things are defined,” said the General. The law protects even the President from his own impetuous decisions.

Beautiful minds. We continued our streak of International beauty contest winners this year when  Jannie Loudette Alipo-on was crowned Miss Tourism International 2017 just this week. Miss Earth and Reina Hispanoamericana are among the other high profile titles brought home by our beautiful Filipina bets.

But most beautiful of all is Filipina Hillary Diane Andales of the Philippine Science High School Leyte campus who took home the grand prize of P20M in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge. She bested 11,000 participants from 178 countries. The contest is a global science video competition where entrants try to simplify the complex scientific ideas for the layman. Her video was on Relativity and Equivalence of Reference Frames.

The Breakthrough Junior Challenge was founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and wife, Priscilla Chan; Google co-founder Sergei Brin and Ann Wojcicki; and Yuri and Julia Milner of Digital Sky Technologies.

The golden ticket. The Philippine Association of Law Schools (PALS) officially turns 50 this year. Founded in 1967 by the deans of 12 Manila based law schools, PALS has endured to emerge stronger and become one of the oldest surviving associations of professional schools in the country. Its membership has expanded through the years to include virtually all the nation’s 124 law schools.

The PALS has served as a valuable instrument through which educators have contributed to charting the course of legal education via the introduction of far reaching reforms. The most important contributions of PALS were its proposals for standardization of legal education and the introduction of a model law curriculum. PALS is also credited for the strong push for the establishment of the Legal Education Board to oversee the operations of law schools.

PALS is the academe’s formal representative to the Legal Education Board; the Philippine Judicial Academy; the Mandatory Continuing Legal Education  Governing Board; the  Supreme Court Committee on Legal Education and Bar Matters.

Changing of the guard. Last night, PALS deans from Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao and Metro Manila celebrated its golden milestone at a gala dinner in the Solaire Grand Ballroom. Our theme: Progressive Legal Education at the Core of a Strong Nation. This speaks to how legal education is recognized as the powerful force that it is in promoting and upholding the rule of law. The PALS would work toward ensuring that its member schools continue to be mindful of our role. And to impress upon us the urgency of this charge, PALS guest of honor and keynote speaker was legal education’s foremost benefactor, Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes P.A. Sereno.

The 50th anniversary president of the PALS is Soledad D. Mawis of the Lyceum of the Philippines University Law School. After a productive two-year term, she has transferred stewardship of PALS to the capable hands of its president-elect, the visionary Sedfrey M. Candelaria of Ateneo Law.

Congratulations to PALS, its officers and members for a job well done and for raising the bar of service to the profession and society.