Pedestrian Observer GB: OFW REACTION to MALU FERNANDEZ .........

IS SIMPLY THE CHICKEN COMING HOME TO ROOST, by Fidel Umaga of Movement for a Free Philippines.

The OFW is not ignorant of its role in the survival of our nation. That is why it accepts, with mix pride and wariness, the title NEW HEROES OF THE MOTHERLAND. As a matter of fact, the OFW is fully aware that the wages of its sacrifices keep their families alive and our country afloat financially. Yet it could not understand why it is almost always treated less honorably than the REAL TRAITORS to our people and country. It could not understand why, beyond the greed and selfishness which still reign supreme in many of us and in our national polity, it remains one of the most maligned, betrayed, abused, abandoned, ill-treated and neglected sector of our society.

And since the different sectors of the OFWs are still not unified, as they are not yet fully organized as they ought to be, the political decision-makers in the Philippines do not seem to treat the OFW issue, as a whole, with great concern and at par with other organized groups such as the existing big labor unions in the Philippines or some other religious groups e.g. Al Shaddai or the INC. This disparity in treatment and concern that bore on the OFW, exacerbated by its inability to protect its own interest, which inability is rooted from the absence of organized OFW power, coupled with the lack of options available to the OFW to find other ways for his family and loved ones to survive, leave the OFW to grudgingly toil in silence but toil it did without complaint, 24/7, for decades, in lonely strange lands, under forbidding conditions but keeps a smoldering anger slowly burning and building deep in its heart. While the OFW keeps that pain deeply suppressed inside, he slowly unchains himself from the confining shackles of his own circumstances.

Then the Malu Fernandez article came about. Compared to the proverbial cards the OFW was actually dealt with time and time again, the Malu Fernandez article was actually a fable, a bed time story. However, for one reason or another, the Malu Fernandez article became a phenomenal key that seemed to have opened the floodgates to the long suppressed emotions of an oppressed sector of our society. It was like a bell, whose tolling has awakened the Filipino OFW all over the world from its deep slumber. From the slew of insults that peppered the article of Malu Fernandez, the OFW suddenly seems to find the need to have a common voice. Since then, it has never stop talking about Malu Fernanadez. The written diatribes the OFW sent ranged from the most mundane to the most ascerbic. Certain sectors however commented that the reaction of the OFW has turned into a MOB RULE.

Assuming that the OFW’s reaction to Malu Fernandez had metastasized into something of a MOB RULE, did we really bother to ask ourselves the reasons behind the OFW reaction? Is the OFW's reaction to Malu Fernandez's article, merely a manifestation of the nature of the social circumstances that greatly made up the bulk of our OFW, or is it a preview of forthcoming episodes not only from the OFW but also from other sectors of our society which, like the OFW, had long been abandoned and betrayed before, by their leaders and government, but have now found their salvation on their accord and is now on their own road to freedom? I believe it is the latter.

And as such, I think it is simply TOO LITTLE TOO LATE for some quarters to expound NOW on what should be the moral width and breadth of the OFW’s reaction to the subject article. For those of us who opted to simply MOVE ON and NOT TO GET INVOLVED whenever confronted in the past, by the FACE of betrayal and injustice to what was right and just for our OFW, it is plain hypocrisy now for these people to exert their moral influence on our OFW. It is simply the height of their pretension to expect that the OFW owe them a breath of decency.

For those of us who have abandoned the OFW and now find repulsive the so called rabid reaction of some to Malu Fernandez's article, what MOB RULE are we talking about here? Excuse me, but it is simply the chicken coming home in the barn to roost!

These people should rather be most thankful that our OFW still believed that the pen is mightier than the sword. They should pray harder that other sectors of our society, which in the past, had also been betrayed and abandoned by many of us, would react as benign as our OFW as in the Malu Fernandez brouhaha, once they too have found their own road to freedom and a phenomenal key opens their own floodgates.