maybe I’m jaded enough or probably I just don’t care anymore, but when someone is hungry, the stomach doesn’t care if the food was from another poor guy, a simple person, a company wanting media mileage or a saint; That said\u00a0 corporation, individual donors sometimes care to whom they give their donations to, and if someone like Kris Aquino or other stars need to front for a foundation to open the wallets of these donors, We go where the money is.\u00a0 we laud people who help. This brings to mind a scene in “In My Life” where Vilma plays the domineering mom who his son can never seem to please.<\/p>\n
The immediate spur was a text message I received just hours ago from an anonymous sender, whose phone number I\u2019ll keep to myself for now. It said: \u201cABS CBN reported to have received more than 100-Million pesos worth of donations in cash & in kind but they have only released around 130 thousand of relief bags. Assuming that each bag contained 100 pesos worth of goods, that is only 13-Million pesos. There are more than 80-million pesos worth of goods and cash in their possession still. And why does ABS CBN have to wait for Kris Aquino and their stars to be the one to distribute these relief goods?\u201d
\nNow, I\u2019m no friend of the network or of any network\u2014I generally mistrust giant organizations\u2014although I have to admit having some good personal friends at ABS-CBN, and to appearing now and then on ANC as an unpaid resource person on everything from Macintosh machines to cultural scandals. But I had to ask myself, where was this coming from, and why? Why was anyone trying to put down ABS-CBN, which took a leading role in the Ondoy and Pepeng relief effort, at a time when people were properly focused on getting help from whatever source to whoever needed it most? What was ABS-CBN supposed to be doing with all those bags of noodles in its possession\u2014hoard them for its own use?
\nThe ridiculous and ill-timed message\u2014clearly a cheap shot from a personal or corporate adversary\u2014was just another reminder to me of how mean-spirited and (to use a word I\u2019ve been employing a lot lately) snarky we\u2019ve become. It\u2019s a common hazard in this Age of the Rant, which I wrote about two years ago in my piece here on the \u201canti-rant rant.\u201d For anything you do or say, there\u2019s always someone out there with some vile and nasty retort, especially if it can be launched behind the guiltless anonymity of the Internet or of SMS. (I texted the sender back to ask \u201cWho is this please?\u201d but never, of course, got a reply.)
\nOne thing you learn from the Internet is that the world is full of idle, unhappy people\u2014curmudgeons, killjoys, and crackpots who can\u2019t wait for an opportunity to make you as miserable as they are.<\/strong> When I recently wrote about my bumbling attempt to find a suitable birthday present for Beng, and eventually gifting her with a box of imported Spanish soap, I got a message from a reader castigating me for not being nationalistic enough to give her locally made lather; didn\u2019t I know that I was harming Philippine industry, etc. etc? Presumably, this fellow didn\u2019t type out that message on a Taiwanese computer while cooling his fiery Filipino spirit with a gulp of American cola.
\nvia Pinoy Penman<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"maybe I’m jaded enough or probably I just don’t care anymore, but when someone is hungry, the stomach doesn’t care if the food was from another poor guy, a simple person, a company wanting media mileage or a saint; That said\u00a0 corporation, individual donors sometimes care to whom they give their donations to, and if … <\/p>\n