By BEHN FER. HORTALEZA, JR.

YOU can’t blame local officials and traders tripping over each other on radio to sing hallelujahs to business tycoon Lucio Tan the morning after his visit to Dagupan City to receive an honorary degree for leadership in entrepreneurship from the Lyceum Northwestern University. In this material world, it’s to each his own kind of praise, to each his own motive.

It’s rather unkind to say this, I know, but frankly a perceptive reading of their universal acclaim for the man who ranks No. 785 in Forbes’ Magazine’s Top 1,000 Billionaires of the world can be summed up this way: Come on, Lucio, pour us part of your billions here in Dagupan and Pangasinan and you, too, will be our God. A rather selfish, if disdainful, motive at paying tribute to a self-made man who made his pile by the sweat of his brow – and some uncanny sense of business timing.

That, though, is the curse of rich men. They can’t know (until sometimes it’s too late) whether the praises lavished upon them are coming from the heart – or simply with a moist eye on their fortune. To their credit though, many of them including Tan know by instinct who’s genuine and who’s fake from their legion of fawning admirers.

No, I am not anti-Tan, neither am I anti-rich. Some of my best friends are rich and a number of them are Chinese. My beef is against the many out there, some opportunistic mediamen included, who see the image of money, money and more, money in the faces of the well-placed and wealthy who happen to become their acquaintances, no matter how just “nodding” such friendship may be.

It is a testament to how this world has become too materialisti
c that between having an ordinary sorbetero or a trike driver for a pal, we almost always prefer to be in the company (even just being seen fleetingly on camera with them ) of the rich and famous.

The famous Desiderata, the poem authored by Max Ehrmann, a poet-lawyer from Indiana, U.S.A. in 1927, gently reminds us to also “x x x listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story x x x”

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With its city fiesta set this week, San Carlos cityfolk cannot help but grimly remember the violence–marred celebration of this very event a year ago when their beloved Mayor Julian “Jolly” Resuello, who will now be known in history as the father of San Carlos’ newfound modern progress, fell from assassin’s bullets right at the city plaza.

With the remembering too comes the sad commentary that one year after the visionary city executive’s killing, the police have yet to fully wrap up the case with the main triggerman, “Cabeza”, still at large (some say his lips have been sealed – forever). I don’t know if this is making the cops of Provincial Police Director Isagani Nerez squirm in their seats at all, I mean the seeming impunity with which hired assassins operate in this ‘peaceful’ province. The way I look at it, cops, like doctors, have become inured to the anguish of a victim, any victim’s, worried relatives.

I say this because after the initial furor on the abduction of another public figure on Holy Week last March, the controversial Barangay Captain Roland Villegas, the case, from many indications, seems headed for the doldrums again with nary a clue on who could have kidnapped RV and for what motive. And the authorities seem all but ready to bury their heads in the sand once more.

Time heals all wounds – and sweeps big and small crimes under the rug, duh?.

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And while the PNP Pangasinan says it is still looking under every little rock and stone for any sign of Villegas and his kidnappers, it also still has to keep an eye out for the Nice People Around who, according to Nerez’s latest briefing before members of the Provincial Development Council are still, well, very much around – although just on a passing-thru course.

Nerez told the gathering of planners and action men led by Governor Amado T.Espino that the NPA ragtag bands are seen in the border barangays of Pangasinan-Zambales in the west and Pangasinan-Nueva Ecija in the east.

They’re not recruiting members or setting shop, according to the police provincial director, but seem to be just passing by. Still, Nerez considers the incursions serious enough to constitute a threat – to tranquility perhaps?

We can only wonder though, if on the side of Zambales or Nueva Ecija, the counterpart PNP directors aren’t saying the same thing about their own insurgent band sightings – that is, that the rebs are only passing thru too — on their way to Pangasinan?.

Will somebody just please come up now and say JoeMa’s compatriots have all turned domestic tourists out to take in the sights of the countryside by mountain trail trekking on a shoestring budget?

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