The land of good starts

In chess, as in most of life, first moves are rarely decisive.  

It's at the end game where skill becomes evident.

Sunday, in some cultures, is the first day of the week and being the Fourth of July this week, I thought it might be a good day to talk about good starts.

Today, P.Noy has taken his first day off as President and I doubt he'll do it with a wangwang -- siren.

"No wangwang"

July 1 was P.Noy's first whole day at work as President of the Republic of the Philippines and there was much ado about his thirty minute trip to Malacanang from his house in Times Street, Quezon City.

ABS-CBN, like the proud mother/father bringing his/her kid to school for the first time, raved that he went through Quezon Avenue without a wangwang or siren.  

For some reason, the reports of P.Noy's first day at work sounded a bit like the way doting parents exclaim that their kid went to school without diapers, a bag full of dedes (milk bottles), or made poo-poo on the toilet bowl rather than on the floor of the bathroom.

If the point was that P.Noy walked his talk, then I guess the first rush of reports about it would have been enough.  But then, the news at noon was filled with references to P.Noy's no siren policy and this reverberated in early evening newscasts.

Okay, so P.Noy made it through the entire day without using a wangwang. Great! Hundreds of people using wangwangs were apprehended and wangwangs were confiscated.  Even better!

Then July 2 rolled in.  More stories of no wangwang or no sirens.  More stories of people getting busted for using wangwangs.

They say that once is a fluke, twice is an improvement, and three times is a trend... So on July 3, guess what happened?

Yep! More wangwang stories and this time, a bunch of people -- celebrities at that -- voluntarily surrendered their wangwangs.  I think the point to this PR story is that people -- celebrities at that -- are following P.Noy's lead.

The enthusiastic report on ABS-CBN, however, failed to point out that having a siren or wangwang had been  governed by LAWS and REGULATIONS for quite some time -- long before P.Noy became President.  

It is rather unbelievably ridiculous that it had to take a newly elected President of the Republic of the Philippines to get them to follow the law!  It's as if they had just become aware of the LAW on June 30. 

Perhaps, it goes to show, that some people -- celebrities at that -- aren't at all accustomed to obeying the law because it's the law.

More so, it kind of speaks badly about the PNP and MMDA who for years had been AIDING and ABETTING this FLAGRANT violation of law.

Well, it's really a good thing.  At least, they have NOW recognized that what they had been doing for YEARS was actually WRONG.

In any case, as the report wore on, my mind went back to the time when then PNP Chief Panfilo Lacson ordered the police to return all stolen vehicles that had been 'borrowed' for 'missions' to Camp Crame.  NOW THAT and the SIGHT of hundreds of stolen vehicles materializing on the open field in Camp Crame gave me GOOSEBUMPS!

Memo Circular number 1... Er, scratch that... Memo Circular number 1 point 1...

It's really no biggie to change an order after issuing it and what would have been worse is if the first weeks of the new Aquino administration would be hobbled by shortage of executives.  It has enough problems already.

Perhaps this was given undue emphasis by the media and it might have worked to the effect that they can say that they are unbiased.

But really, it's a minor glitch and one that was corrected almost immediately.  No harm, no foul.

Late for work... because he didn't use sirens.

P.Noy was thirty minutes late for the turnover ceremony of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.  Guess why?

Yup! You guessed right.  No wangwang.

Others actually pointed out that the 'no wangwang' policy isn't really to blame for this, but rather, a miscalculation of the travel time.

On the whole...  

On the whole, I think P.Noy's first week wasn't all that bad...  We survived it, after all.