Political action
needed vs. brownouts

Very often, we find ourselves reduced to apathy by events. Especially in the case of brownouts which are always explained as due to the inability by the PNOC-EDC to supply the requirements of the Ceneco.

But this time, there is a movement for electric consumers to mount a political action to compel authorities to come up with doable solutions to the crisis that daily plagues Bacolod consumers.

Worse, it also presents unforeseen possibility to flights coming into the Silay Airport.

Roberto Montelibano, president of the Ceneco, has come out with explanations about the reason for the Ceneco contract with Kepco, which is just about to put up its coal-fuel plant in Cebu.

But Metro Bacolod Chamber of Commerce and Industry vice president Jose Maria Boy Zayco provides Ceneco consumers some promised relief with his signing with the Philippine Bio-Science Corp. to undertake a pre-investment study on the conversion of Bacolod biogradable waste into electricity.

Of course, that is not an immediate thing that could be implemented early to ease the city power shortage. Still, it is a promise of some medium-range solutions to the plight of Ceneco consumers.

So, what do we do? Keep up the political pressure on Ceneco officials. That’s the only way the public can be assured that their needs will be attended to and the Ceneco officials improve their services to diminish the plight of electric consumers.

* * *

The Pope Benedict XVI – came up with the statement that it was more important to have good priests than many priests.

This was after he deplored the pedophilia abuses by Catholic priests in the United States. The scandals had driven many Catholics outside the Church and had caused the Catholic dioceses more than $2 billion in damages paid to the pedophilia victims.

But it seems that hardly anybody had paid much attention to the phenomenon of pedophilia.

Pedophilia is called by the ‘Coming Catholic Church’ as sexual activity by an adult with pre-buscent child – that is a child thirteen or younger.

The problem was that some Catholic bishops simply reassigned the pedophiles to other parishes where they commit the same mistakes later.

It seems that none of them had recognized that “pedophilia resists treatment, much less cure.”

It cited the findings of the American Psychiatric Association that “unlike successful treatment outcomes for mental illness, the outlook for successful treatment and rehabilitation of individuals with pedophilia is guarded.”

“Even after intensive treatment, the case of the disorder usually is chronic and life-long in most patients,” the study concluded.

In short, pedophiles tend to be recidivists. Thus, transferring them to another parish simply provides opportunities for pedophiles to victimize others.

This is something which our local prelates seem not to have known. It is because there is hardly a strong effort by local bishops to have pedophiles subjected to treatment by psychiatrists.

* * *

There is something dangerous in the barangay’s distributing the identification cards of those who will be entitled to buy NFA rice among barangay residents.

Let’s be honest about it. Barangay officials, by and large, are themselves politicos. They depend on their constituents for their election. Thus, it is not farfetched to suspect that this food rations could become a source of corruption and graft, i.e., worse, to recruit potential voters to their ranks.

The government must be able to devise a surefire system that could do away with the use of these cards for political purposes.

But it would be ill-advised for the government to adopt a system that is fraught with dire possibilities.*

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