Poor Conrado de Quiros. He’s so disappointed with the flaccidity of the “outrage” he was expecting in the aftermath of the arrest of our “hero” Jun Lozada that he resorts to that tired pill of guilt that generations of political “experts” have shoved down Filipinos’ throats:

I’ve said it before: You don’t have to like Jun Lozada to be alarmed and angry at the way he is being harassed and persecuted. I’ve heard people, including some friends, complain that he calls attention to himself a little too much. Well, even if true, what of it? I still challenge people to see if they can ever do what he did in this life or the next. If they can turn their backs on fortune (this regime has been known to liberally reward the tractable and rotten) and risk life and limb (this regime has been known to implacably hound the unyielding and decent) just to be able to say his piece. If they can put their spouses and kids on the line, compelling them to live the life of refugees in their own land, opening them up to threats and deprivation, because conscience knocked so loudly it couldn’t be ignored anymore.

One can see above, he even fancies himself as some kind of authority on how virtuous an individual human life is based on:

:D How much or how little people do that is of “value” to society:

I still challenge people to see if they can ever do what he did in this life or the next.

:D How they choose to manage and dispose of their personal resources:

If they can turn their backs on fortune (this regime has been known to liberally reward the tractable and rotten) [...]

:D How much personal risk to life and limb one needs to face:

[...] and risk life and limb (this regime has been known to implacably hound the unyielding and decent) just to be able to say his piece.

Worst of all he also presumes to be an authority on how much danger, inconvenience, and sacrifice we might be inclined to put our family and children through to live up to his idea of what a worthy individual is:

If they can put their spouses and kids on the line, compelling them to live the life of refugees in their own land, opening them up to threats and deprivation, because conscience knocked so loudly it couldn’t be ignored anymore.

The part about the kids thing really gets to me. Judge me on how brave, courageous or, yes, “heroic” I am — or not. Judge me even on how much value I am adding to Filipino society by what I do in my personal time (which is none of anyone’s business to begin with). But leave the children out of it asshole. Conrado de Quiros speaks as if there is some kind of noble fight left in the Philippines worth the lives of one’s family and kids. I’ve got news for you, dude: There is no fight. There is no fight worth MY life in the Philippines, and certainly there is no fight worth MY KIDs’ lives.

As I wrote a while back:

Indeed, there is nothing to be “won” — only something to be implemented.

Our “experts” will have us believe that there is a “fight” to be “won” and that “people power” is our “weapon”. Being the collective fools that we are, we’ve lapped up that laughable tagline for the last quarter-century — in the process losing sight of (I dare say deliberately ignoring) what essentially is the real job at hand.

We don’t need “heroes”, magicians, or magical artefacts to move forward. All we need are (1) people who think and (2) people who mount actions that are robustly underpinned by said thinking.

I believe Jun Lozada either made a serious miscalculation in sticking his neck out in this whole affair, or seriously mis-managed his PR machine and squandered the goodwill he had established with the public back when he was still the kind of rockstar “hero” that the hollow-headed Filipino public is predisposed to create for their consumption every couple of years or so.

I don’t think any father and husband worth his salt would deliberately put his family at risk unnecessarily. If Lozada did so unwittingly, then that just simply makes him an even bigger dimwit, doesn’t it? Either way, de Quiros is the kind of bozo that turns morons into accidental heroes and uses the even more accidental “sacrifices” of the families of said morons as bonus capital to pitch their proposition.

The fact is, the current plight of Jun Lozada’s family and kids come across as mere collateral damage in his dimwitted bid to become the Greatest Filipino Hero of our recent history.

What an unfortunate circumstance for children to be the victims of their father’s misguided sense of self-importance.

But then to subject children and hapless spouses to conscription (even in the conceptual way that a newspaper column allows) in some deluded war being waged is just plain faggotry, “Mister” de Quiros. At least Hitler was in the middle of a real war when he scraped the bottom of the barrel puting young boys in the service of the Wehrmacht in the closing days of that Great War.

Indeed, as I wrote back in 2003: Heroes, when will we get over them??

The most notable achievements of the country have always been our quick fixes — “revolutions” here and there, a smattering of go-go boom-boom periods, Magnificent Sevens riding in from the horizon, grandiose roll-outs of off-the-shelf solutions (democracy is one of them), etc. etc. We as a people are not known for quiet diligence and industry but for our *fiesta* achievements.

Our prospects for prosperity, however, lie within ourselves — not in a messianic bunch of leaders and exceptional few who are yet to come and not in the altruism of the more fortunate. What we need is the courage and open-mindedness to understand clearly what we need to do to re-tool our culture, mindsets and thought processes, and approach to doing things so that a nation-building machine that is truly able to compete could emerge out of the collective and quiet achievement of the majority.

Let’s change these medieval beliefs in salvation through heroic deeds and focus more on the more mundane aspects of nation-building.

Let’s allow everyone to do their jobs properly without being burdened by expectations that accompany heroic labels.

Let’s change our self-righteous penchant for calling one another to heroic and extraordinary deeds and instead find value in the collective effect of each individual doing their ordinary jobs properly and quietly.

We as a people need to grow up and do real work for a change instead of aspiring to get what we want by throwing tantrums every now and then.

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