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No cheating, please! When was the last time you heard
those words? Does it bring to mind the days of your youth when you
were struggling to pass your tests in elementary and high school?
Quickly, let’s recall them. It seems we need them today more than
ever. Look around. Everybody is engaged in cheating.
Businessmen cheating with their
tax payments. Legislators cheating on their “pork barrel” funds.
Professionals such as doctors and lawyers living in luxury but
declaring poverty-level income. Customs and revenue collectors
cheating us blind. Unfaithful husbands and wives cheating each
other. Politicians cheating in the polls. Fat people on diet
cheating themselves by eating when nobody is looking. The list is
long. Civic organizations would make waves by picking the biggest
cheats among us, based on various criteria and classifications. The
big winner will be the “most outstanding cheat of the year.”
Apparently, there is no shortage
of candidates for this rare award. We foresee only one small
problem: the winners might decline to come forward to accept the
award and admit to cheating. The problem, of course, can be solved
if the organizers would offer a big amount of money to go with the
award. Many people would admit anything for money.
Will a cheat appear in a Senate
investigation and offer testimony in exchange for a fee? Why not?
According to Jun Lozada, a well-known witness in an ongoing
investigation on alleged overpricing in a multi-billion-peso
government project, cheating is fine if it is not more than $65
million, which is a lot of leeway.
Lozada, who said he is not a
saint and admits to some “irregularity” in his former job as
president of a government agency, did not explain why he chose the
amount as benchmark figure. When converted into pesos the amount
would run into mind-boggling millions. Does that make it worth
cheating for?
We know that cheats would not
hesitate to take extreme measures to get what they want. Remember
Judas Iscariot, who cheated Jesus Christ with his kiss of death? He
would be the biggest cheat of all time. The cheats often also get
their comeuppance. It’s just a matter of time. Pickpockets and
snatchers, for example, who are cornered by people responding to
screams for help, are beaten black and blue. They should be thankful
that crucifixions and death by guillotine are no longer in use
today.
In Germany, a cheat trying to
avoid deportation to his native India where he faces fraud charges,
swallowed a knife when he was caught by German authorities. German
police told Indian officials they could not extradite Nath Ghosh to
New Delhi Amarendra because he was a sick man with a
1-centimeter-long blade in his belly, which could not be removed
without legal consent. The Indian cheat fled six years ago to
Germany after being charged of defrauding several Indian banks of
276 rupees ($6.7 million). After a four-year battle, Germany finally
agreed to Ghosh’s extradition on the condition that he was flown
back in an “air ambulance.”
Ghosh is now detained in a New
Delhi high-security jail. If found guilty and sentenced to prison,
the knife in his belly will be removed because Indian law does not
permit jailed convicts to possess weapons. If the knife doesn’t
work, will a good yarn told with great skill have a better chance of
getting a cheat off the hook? The yarn can be accompanied with great
acting such as teary-eyed admission to a past mistake, or look of
innocent bafflement to a pointed question, or indignant facial
riposte to a perceived slight.
Bad actors and cheats don’t
give up easily, which makes them dangerous. And sometimes they
succeed in achieving their goals.
But the cheats will only succeed
if we allow them. They will succeed if we acquiesce to their
chicanery. They will not succeed if we unmask them as frauds. It
does not matter that their fellow cheats gather around to show
support and proclaim the cheat a hero instead. When you call a cheat
a hero, will that change his lies into truths or correct the effects
of his cheating? The answer is obvious but some people don’t
bother to look deeper for the truth. When you point out their lapse
in judgment they say: ”Ay, oo nga pala. He, he, he.”
You can call a cheat a hero, but
he is still a cheat. Will the warning, “No cheating, please”,
work on somebody bent on cheating? If the warning doesn’t work,
the “taong-bayan” might just hang him up a tree.
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