The Chair

It's sad when someone so powerful is so devoid of compassion. Years back, when I needed to go to Cavite for the installation of a bishop, our car was color-coded so I wrote Mayor Jejomar Binay, then MMDA chair, to ask how I could get an exemption for that day. I addressed the letter to his house and his secretary called me up to give me instructions on how to go about it. We were able to go to Cavite without being fearful we'd be stopped. We had a permit from Mayor Binay, then MMDA Chair.

A few years later, I met him in church and decided to thank him personally. When he saw I was in a wheelchair, he said I should get year-long passes instead. I never managed to do that while he was chair. He has since been replaced by the OTHER.

The OTHER is something else. He puts pink fences in the middle of most roads. He has his reasons except that those reasons which justify the infrastructure discriminate against the disabled. Where before I could cross streets in my wheelchair, this is no longer possible because of the pink fences.

today, 20 July, disabled folk like me wheeled/walked in crutches to his office. Bully for him he didn't entertain them but let his surrogate face the disgruntled citizens. He acceded to an interview which came out on TV, though, and said, "Hindi lahat ng gusto ng tao pwedeng maibigay. May limitasyon din dapat", or something to that effect. Think dear OTHER, the disabled are such not of their own choosing. As it is we are physically challenged and you pose another challenge for us, something we don't need but which you can and do control? How dare you create even more barriers for us. And what about the Accessibility Law? Are you so powerful that you are exempt from obeying that law? How heartless can you get, how insensitive?

Years back, my husband brought the matter up in a forum and one of the employees in his place of work berated him in an email-- he had an ax to grind and all that, the lady said. So OTHER-sounding. An apologist? I doubt. Someone just as heartless. Months later, she wrote my husband in effect apologizing indirectly. She knew what it was like to be disabled, she said, because weeks after she wrote my husband, she fractured her leg and was in a cast for months.

Oh well, THE OTHER, there's such a think as DIVINE JUSTICE and though the wheels of God grind slowly, they grind exceeding small.