Everyone now knows who Jun Lozada is. I don't know him personally and this post has actually nothing to do with the national impact of JLo's disclosures.
This is about how watching him before the Senate summoned memories and evoked emotions of an incident that happened to me about ten years ago ... something which I had long been wanting to delete from my memory but apparently had failed to do.
I have already written about this 2 or 3 years ago but it's harder to search through my archives than to write about it again.
The first time I watched Jun Lozada on TV, I must confess that I got irritated. It was rather awkward to see a grown up man so fraught with emotions in full view of the public especially because, in our culture, men should always be "macho macho". Involuntarily, the thought that came to my mind was the Filipino expression "ka lalaki mong tao ..." which is what we usually say if a man is doing something - crying, for instance - that we think he shouldn't be doing in public or not be doing at all.
Later, when I watched again - this time he was being pummeled by Senators Santiago (for once, I didn't find entertaining what Miriam had to say), Arroyo (I was so, so disappointed in him and for the first time, I understood why my father so disliked him!) and Enrile (in the first place, when did this man regain credibility?), I felt that he was being pressured to either refrain from saying whatever else he wanted or needed to say or recant everything that he had already said. I looked at Jun Lozada and understood why sometimes he looked at once bemused and irritated, exasperated, angry ... and sometimes on the verge of tears.
Except for the latter (i.e. crying or wanting to cry), this was exactly the range of emotions I felt - from anger to amusement ("oh, you fools! how can you even think you can make me do what you want me to do?!") when my own former bosses ganged up on me "to request that a student's grade be reconsidered because he was a candidate for magna cum laude". The italics are mine to emphasize how differently they viewed it from what I understood I was being made to do. To me, it was like, "you are hereby ordered to change the student's grade so he will graduate magna cum laude." Of course they didn't put it in writing and nobody said it was an order. But I got daily calls (in the morning and in the afternoon) from all the big bosses. They called me to their offices so "we can talk about this" - invitations which I flatly turned down. Gentle persuasion, you might say, but ... I no longer want to go into the details of this incident. Suffice it to say, they didn't succeed and, in fairness, one of the bosses later apologized when I explained to him how I computed the student's grade.
So how would I have reacted if I were in Jun Lozada's shoes? I think I would have responded in the same way I responded to my bosses then: "If you badly want to do that, prepare the grading sheet yourselves. I will sign it but I will also state there that I was signing it to comply with your requests." The matter was dropped after that and I never again received a similar "request".
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I am also disappointed at how the President's Men comport themselves. Many of them are lawyers and looking at them bring to mind one important fact about why judges give more credence to the testimony of a witness in court: they can see how the witnesses behave while testifying. Watch the President's Men closely and you will see what I mean.
I am also disappointed at how our own provincial government and many other politicians (mayors, governors, etc.) replied when they were asked about their support for the President. In effect they said, "we support GMA because ... of the many projects that she has given us." Our own vice-governor cited the new Bacolod-Silay airport. My foot! This implied that "we don't care what happens - they can lie and cheat, they can rob us blind - as long as we get projects from them". Oh yes, I forgot ... you cannot bite the hand that feeds you.
God help us all.
