Watch Me Entertain Myself!

Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.
(pilot episode: 20 January 2004)

Monday, April 02, 2007

Hostage, Hostage, Bakit Ka Ginawa?

Okay so the following incident is a little “old” given today’s lifespan of news items (unless it involves Anna Nicole Smith, in which case it extends for weeks on end), but what the heck. Remember Armando Ducat, Jr., the man who held 26 children hostage for 10 hours inside a bus, demanding that the government provide better education and health for the said kids? He surrendered after several hours with no injuries to any of the hostages. He did it to dramatize his point and make sure it caught everyone’s attention. Well, he succeeded—even CNN and the BBC picked up the news.

What a sad state of affairs, right? But what to me was saddest about the whole thing was a newspaper article I read a couple of days after the hostage crisis. The children’s parents were not going to press charges against Ducat. In fact one of them, a Mirabelle Moreno, said, “We don’t want him in jail. He was just doing what he thought was right and just for us, the poor.”

Oh yeah right, he was doing “what he thought was right and just.” And “for the poor.” Sad indeed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had the same reaction as you. Yes, how sad that people have to resort to such extreme methods. However, I have no sympathy for such people who consciously abuse and threaten children, even for supposedly noble ends. I say, throw the book at Ducat. He should go to jail.