My daughter texted me that a woman’s mother died on Edsa because the ambulance taking her to the emergency room could not make it through the traffic caused by the five-day people-power rally of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) and not by Joseph Emilio A. Abaya and Francis N. Tolentino over the previous 900 days of equally horrid traffic when no ambulance could get through, as well. Sub specie aeternitatis, which is to say in the wider scheme of all things that each life is as valuable as everything else put together, be it the life of so famous a personage as GMA inhumanly denied expert treatment abroad by a sociopathetic government, or that of an ordinary person’s, like your parent or mine, delayed, and, thereby, denied the emergency care that might have saved her.
I suggested at the height of the rally that INC consider massing, not on, but alongside Edsa, with five times the number that already terrified the government; leaving just enough room for ambulances to get through. Next time, do that. Indeed, in five days of INC traffic one person died, contrary to Abaya’s flippant remark that traffic is never fatal. Turning this data over to a statistician, if one died in five days of anticipated traffic, then over the past 900 days of unannounced, but equally horrid traffic on EDSA, 180 people perished albeit incognito because it was in no one’s political interest to raise an outcry rather than do a cover-up for Abaya and Tolentino.
Now CNN Philippines reports that a commercial emergency medical service claims that it turned down 50 requests for ambulances that would have to pass through the INC rally without even attempting it, and that, in its estimate, as many as six died in those five days. Now if six died in just five days of the INC rally, then in 900 days, a small fraction more than 900 people died on Abaya’s and Tolentino’s watch. That, to me, is mass murder.