Villamor Air Base is our new EDSA

They look like a long red sash of blood — 42 metal coffins draped with the Philippine flag.

From the angle of the first pictures that emerged from Villamor Air Base as they were brought down from the C130 planes and lined up under the morning sun, you can only see the red side of the flag.

It was unintentional, but it seemed fitting for our policemen from the elite Special Action Force (SAF) coming home in military coffins that the red side of the flag is all we can see (red side up for when the country is at war, blue side up for peacetime). You can’t even clearly make out the white part with its three stars for Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao where they were massacred on Jan. 25.

On the morning of our SAF boys’ return, there was something very wrong with the scene at Villamor, something that was beginning to wipe away the silence and give way to an anger as big as the one we felt for the Muslim rebels who shot many of the policemen in the head and then proceeded to rob them of their firearms, clothing, watches, and cell phones. (We have horrific pictures of the dead bodies in the newsroom, but if we pixelated them for print there would be nothing left.)

And there it was, that feeling of failure: their commander in chief was missing.

The distance from Malacañang Palace to Villamor Air Base is approximately 11.7 kilometers. With moderate Metro Manila traffic, you can get there in 25 minutes.

Instead of taking this short distance and the one hour it would have taken President Noynoy Aquino to receive and honor the fallen troops at Villamor Air Base, he chose to go outside Metro Manila to open a Mitsubishi plant in Sta. Rosa, Laguna — 41 kilometers from Malacañang Palace.

On that day, the distance between Malacañang Palace and the people became unbridgeable.

The question on everybody’s minds was why the President chose not to go to Villamor. Every excuse the Palace gave was unsatisfactory (the plant opening was an important investment; he was going to go to the necrological rites instead at Camp Bagong Diwa the next day, for which he was late by the way).

The Palace should have simply confirmed what everybody has been saying: the President lacks empathy and doesn’t really care about other people’s suffering.

We saw this already a year into his presidency. When typhoon Sendong (Washi) struck on Dec. 16, 2011, killing 1,200 people in Mindanao — Malacañang Palace proceeded with its Christmas party days later. Even as hundreds of dead bodies started floating in the floodwaters, the President was partying with starlets that were presumably invited by his actress-sister Kris Aquino, a woman who has been shooting herself in the foot for so many years it’s a wonder she can still walk.

More recently, when typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) struck, it took the President several days before he came out to comfort the victims — with words and actions that conveyed very little sincerity.

And on Thursday, our SAF troopers came home and their commander in chief was nowhere in sight. Should we really have been surprised?

The question then is why? Why is the President so unsympathetic, so lacking in empathy, so unskilled in giving comfort to his people when this nation has shown its overwhelming support and sympathy after his father Ninoy was assassinated in 1983, when his mother Cory became president and overthrew the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, when she died in 2009, and when he got elected in 2010?

The answer may very well lie there: because the President from his boyhood has been so used to receiving sympathy and support that he has never learned to give it. He feels entitled. His ego would not even let the SAF massacre be about the fallen — he had to bring up his own father’s sacrifice, too, during his speech.

You can almost see it in the faces of some of the grieving families, as if they were saying: Too late, Mr. President.

Since typhoon Yolanda hit the country in 2013, Villamor Air Base has seemingly become our new EDSA, that avenue that encompasses the wealthiest gated neighborhoods of Makati down to the north and into the chaotic ghetto that is Caloocan. EDSA was the place where we traditionally voiced our anger at government corruption and our euphoria for kicking out another administration.

Except EDSA today, both the avenue and the people’s revolutions, has become irrelevant with every president doing exactly what the previous one did, which is to betray their people through corruption and incompetence.

But Villamor Air Base, this small strip that is home to our Armed Forces and named after a Filipino WW2 pilot, has in the past two years become the place where Manila comes together when an event of national importance or a natural disaster takes place. Only then is civilian access allowed.

In November 2013, when typhoon Yolanda devastated Tacloban and the rest of the Visayas, military personnel flew to Manila thousands of evacuees who had relatives in Luzon, or even those that didn’t because it seemed to them that it was better to end up homeless in these streets rather than stay in the hell that the typhoon had left in its wake.

No one told them to, but volunteers converged at Villamor with clothes, food, and other relief goods. It was one of the many places where packing relief goods became the new after-work thing to do instead of going out in bars. And on weekends? Volunteers set up operations to drive evacuees in their private cars to their relatives, where sometimes those relatives turned out to be living in the farthest point of Luzon where it could take 10 hours one way. And if no one could do this, people opened their wallets and gave them bus fare.

Yet, even as volunteers did this every day for several weeks, a number of people still went to the air base with the sole intention of diverting and stealing relief goods, and snatching the cell phones and handbags of volunteers.

Just three weeks ago, people again went to Villamor for the arrival of Pope Francis. Children from private Catholic schools and orphanages waited for hours, sang and danced. It was an incredibly contagious, joyous sight on TV.

His message that government must take care of its people still rings in our ears. Maybe the politicians did listen.

Oh, but how wrong we were!

And again the Pope was back at Villamor as he flew on a stormy Saturday to visit the typhoon victims in Tacloban and deliver a moving homily that left even the atheists and journalists in tears.

 Looking at the images of the fallen troopers at  Villamor Air Base, we can only repeat to the policemen’s families the very same words spoken to typhoon victims and orphans: We can only walk with you all with our silent hearts.

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