Editorial - Heidi and Clarissa

In a country short of heroes, Heidi Mendoza has become the latest darling of those in desperate search of people willing to risk everything for the truth they believe in. She is what Clarissa Ocampo had been in the Joseph Estrada impeachment trial 11 years ago.

Deliberately or unconsciously, people have started to put Heidi and Clarissa together. And it is difficult to put a finger on the why. Sadly, however, other than that both are women, and women of great courage and moral character, the similarities seem to end there.

Forget the physical attributes, because they are incidental. But no two persons can be as different from each other than Heidi and Clarissa, despite having shared the experience of going down the same arduous road, though a decade apart, in exactly the same direction.

Heidi tends to cry a lot. She cannot seem to proceed without collapsing into some form of emotional display that, no doubt, adds drama to her testimony. Clarissa, on the other hand, kept her emotions in check. She had a quiet sense of dignity around her. She was serene and composed.

Whether any of these  the feminine attributes of Heidi or the cold strength of Clarissa  contributed to the validity and importance of what they had to tell the nation, or on the contrary detracted from them, we do not know.

Perhaps their testimony can stand on their own regardless of the extraneous circumstances of their bearers. Maybe, in the end, all that truly matters is the message and not the messenger. Maybe this is what the nation should look out for, the acts of heroism rather than the heroes.

Thus, the longer Heidi keeps on crying, the greater the possibility it starts to get into people’s nerves and begins to distract attention from what she is saying, which is the important thing.

Moreover, in case you have not noticed, Heidi has to stop calling attention to herself by describing how honest and upright a person she is and how difficult it is to be so. Heidi needs to know that people have a way of knowing without being told.

 For the moment anyone starts to sing about herself, at almost every opportunity before the cameras, it takes a toll on what she is narrating, no matter how truthful. Heidi should just be like Clarissa and tell it as it is instead of getting the messenger in the way of the message.