Dirty finger

 I laughed so hard when I saw the Duterte patriarch cussed and dirty fingered the media people in front of national TV. Not to be outdone, the son, a barangay captain who was also a member of the city council, also dirty fingered the media. It seemed the first family of Davao does a lot of dirty fingering.

Again, there was nothing humorous about local leaders acting like teen-age punks because it was unbecoming of a civil servant. But despite the mayor’s actions, (it seemed that) she was supported by the leaders and the people of the city maybe because the Dutertes have done very well for the city. Though the elder Duterte, now the vice mayor, has employed unorthodox methods to improve the peace and order of the city, though he was criticized by human rights group, still he produced results and has made Davao City the city that it is now, peaceful and conducive to business opportunities and a tourist destination. When people were fed up with mediocre and ineffective leaders and new but unorthodox leaders were elected, they tend to overlook the new leaders frailties and idiosyncrasies as long as they were delivering their promises.  

Of course another reason why the people of Davao supported ( or seemed to be supporting) the Duterte’s was, maybe, they were afraid of the city's first family. What choice was there when the mayor is a Duterte, the father of the mayor, the vice mayor; the brother of the mayor, a counselor, what you have was a local monarchy. Even the court sheriff, the victim, dared not file charges and instead he, the aggrieved, was the one who apologized to the mayor. Now that was weird.

It seemed that there were no critics, no condemnation from the opposition in Davao. Or maybe there were no oppositions in Davao because they were fingered into silence.

What ever it was the whole thing was it was entertaining—better than comedy shows.

Now the DILG and the Human Rights Commission are joining the drama. 

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My wife checked on my daughter’s school things, and she found a note saying “no assignment.” (This may seem like an invasion of privacy…) My first reaction was to get angry, but since she was now in high school, a teen-ager, I held my tongue. She had been spending too much time facebooking and this has distracted her from school work. I kept on telling her that she must prioritize her studies, but the temptation of logging in must have overcome her many times.  So to tell her that I meant business, I put a password on our computer.

When I got home yesterday she was already there reading and writing. She smiled asking for the password. I told her that she had to first finish all her schoolwork before she could even touch the computer. My daughter obeyed without any sign of hmmm…defiance or bitterness, as far as I could tell from her mien, but what’s going on in her mind could be something else.

I did not sleep until all her school work was done because if I even let up for a second, she would open her facebook account and that’s the end of her study.