Grandmother Aurelia Matias teaches Facebook users, TV viewers ‘true love’

By: DJ Yap
Philippine Daily Inquirer

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Aurelia Matias’ search for her missing husband is captured on film by amateur photographer Reddie Js.

About 60,000 strangers helped Lola Aurelia find her missing husband.

In return, the 78-year-old woman taught them a lesson about love.

Aurelia Matias’ poignant quest to find her beloved Luis, 78, who had been missing for weeks in the streets of Manila, captured the imagination of thousands after a street photographer snapped her picture and posted it on Facebook (FB).

It quickly went viral as more than 60,000 Facebook users shared, reposted and retweeted the black-and-white photo showing a bespectacled Lola Aurelia, her back facing the camera with the missing person poster pinned to her dress.

With the help of big TV networks covering the unfolding story, a search was launched. Finally, on Tuesday evening, Lola Aurelia found Lolo Luis in a dramatic reunion near the Quirino station of the Light Railway Transit on Taft Avenue.

“Many thanks to the many people helping me. They did not let me down,” she said in an interview aired over “24 Oras,” the evening newscast of GMA network.

“First to God. I know all the people who helped me, God gave you to me,” Lola Aurelia said.

Campaign starts

The online campaign to find Lolo Luis began on Monday with a picture posted on Facebook by “Reddie Js,” a street photography enthusiast.

“I saw this old woman sitting by herself yesterday at the corner of Buendia and Roxas Boulevard,” he said in a note that accompanied the photo.

“Surprised to see a sheet of bond paper pinned in front and the back of her dress with a picture of a missing old man, I asked her about it and she said it was her husband who had been missing for two weeks now,” he added.

“I was touched by her integrity and was pained to see her looking for him in that manner so I decided to help her, too. I asked permission to post her picture here in FB to be shared by others as help for finding Mr. Luis Matias,” Reddie said.

The photo drew dozens of comments, mostly expressing support and vowing to help spread the story.

A Facebook user named Allan Du Yaphockun wrote: “My parents (have) been married for 57 years before my father passed away last August. My mother still misses my father so much. It pains me to see a situation like this. Although I am far from Manila. I would comment, like and share this to show concern and spread the search.”

So touching

Another, Charmaine Santiago Dee So, said the photograph was so touching it made her cry. “Hope she finds lolo soonest as I can feel her pain. I know God will bless them both and he will find a way,” she posted.

On Wednesday, Reddie expressed joy that Lolo Luis had been found. He thanked everyone who helped, including the GMA and ABS-CBN networks, whose “big machinery,” energized the search, as well as all Facebook users who circulated the picture.

But he said he was most grateful to Lola Aurelia: “Your extravagant way of showing how you love your husband so much that you would go thru such depths of even wearing the posters on your dress was the reason I noticed you,” he wrote.

“It caught my eye, and my heart! That is the simplest reason why you found Lolo again! The picture I took of you is the best picture I know I’ll cherish forever. It is a picture of ‘Love.’ Maraming maraming salamat po (Thanks a lot) Lola!” Reddie said.

Tears for love

Journalist Kara David, who personally joined Lola Aurelia in her search, said she couldn’t help but shed tears as she listened to Lola Aurelia describe her love for her husband.

“I had to ask the cameraman to zoom in to Lola because I didn’t want the camera to catch me crying,” she said in a phone interview.

“What she showed was unconditional love. She was saying, ‘I don’t want to just see him again, but I want to serve him. I want to serve him still.’ For me, that was a huge lesson about love,” David said.

She said she felt a sense of “community spirit” in the search for Lolo Luis as strangers sent text messages with information about his possible whereabouts, or just simple greetings of best wishes and good luck.

“This is one situation when we saw how social media can be used for something good, and that social media can be a tool for compassion, not just for bullying, or spreading destructive lies or jokes,” she said.

Trending topic

On Tuesday evening, “Lola Aurelia and Lolo Luis” became one of the top “trending topics” on Twitter worldwide, as netizens posted comments on the couple’s moving reunion.

David said Lola Aurelia’s story was a “jewel” among missing persons’ stories because of the kind of person she is.

“She is such an endearing person; she is not your ordinary person. Here you have an elderly woman who will walk long distances to look for her husband. That’s the reason this story became such a hit,” she said.

False alarms

After several false alarms and various trips around Metro Manila when the information sent via text message or online turned out to be false, David said a concerned citizen eventually sent a tip that someone who looked like Lolo Luis was spotted near the Quirino LRT station.

By then David said she had left to file her story at the GMA offices in Quezon City. “What I did was to leave my cameraman and my driver with Lola Aurelia so they could check out the other places,” she said.

Which is why she was not on the scene during the actual reunion. “I didn’t mind because the story wasn’t about me. It was about Lola Aurelia and Lolo Luis,” she said.

David said there was no “network war” involved in the coverage of Lola Aurelia’s story, and she even credited ABS-CBN as being the first to interview her on Tuesday.

But she said GMA just “got lucky” since her cameraman happened to be with Lola Aurelia for the latter half of the day till early evening when Lolo Luis was finally found, resulting in 24 Oras’ exclusive footage of the reunion. With a report from Lawrence de Guzman, Inquirer Research

TKO

By: Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer

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What a difference a decent president makes.

When Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had Joseph Estrada arrested shortly after she came to power, she might have been a lawful president, courtesy of Edsa 2, but not a welcome one. The public had no problems with Erap (Estrada) being punished, but they had every problem with Arroyo doing the punishing. The sight of Erap being fingerprinted like a common criminal in a police station did not give the unadulterated feeling of justice being done, it gave the uneasy feeling of an upstart trying to consolidate her foothold on power.

The result was “Edsa 3,” a parody of the first two Edsas but one that showed a lack of moral starkness to Arroyo’s cause. The unshod crowd (literally in some cases) was even bigger at its swell than that of the other two Edsas. It lost steam on its own, but Arroyo never got any traction from it.

After P-Noy (Aquino) ordered Arroyo arrested last week, the near-universal reaction was satisfaction, if not jubilation. The sight of Arroyo being served the warrant in St. Luke’s did not spark a burst of awa, it launched a wave of text jokes. Only Arroyo’s allies, who can now be counted on the fingers of one hand, decried it as persecution, everybody else lauded it as justice.

The sight of Gloria being fingerprinted in a police station—if that ever happens—will not stoke fires of fury, it will spark sighs of relief. Her reduction to a common criminal (despite being an uncommon one like Marcos) will not induce cries of anger, it will unleash explosions of merriment. I don’t know that her camp can raise more than a dozen people to protest it. I do know it will not include Mikey Arroyo who has done a Ramona. And I do know it will not include some relatives, including a sister, who will be rejoicing with the rest of the country.

I did worry for a while that the Arroyo camp might be able to milk her medical condition dry or exploit the public’s capacity for awa with it. That is, that they might go for the emotional pitch, which has a way of getting places in this country. The public might never forget its detestation of her, but it could always pity her. But that camp did not, which only shows how little they sense the public mood. They chose instead to fight back through law and feistiness.

Maybe it was because being an object of pity was alien to Arroyo, or the notion of trying to become so was anathema to her. She had after all loomed as one of the most powerful persons in the world, even preening in Davos as economic adviser to it. Or maybe they figured that with Renato Corona as chief justice, law was their comfort zone, they were nakasandal sa pader with it. Whatever the reason, and it is enough to believe in Providence, she has missed the only opening available to her.

In fact, the law is not Arroyo’s ally. The spectacle of her lawyers frothing in the mouth, even threatening P-Noy with impeachment if he does not bow to Corona, does not fill us with awe, it fills us with revulsion. It reminds us of the time when she, like Marcos, used the law against the law, or wielded the law to thwart justice. It reminds us of the law that jailed Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani and Col. Alexander Balutan who testified against her, the law that put the country under emergency rule, executive privilege. The more they cry law, the more the public sees blood. Or the more it wants to put the Arroyos behind bars.

Neither is feistiness Arroyo’s ally. There is a difference between being feisty and being overbearing, between being resolute and being tyrannical. Leila de Lima is feisty, Arroyo is overbearing. P-Noy is resolute, Arroyo is tyrannical. The difference is not lost on the public, particularly when given ample reminders of it. Arroyo’s decision to gut it out at the airport reminds us of the time she chose to gut it out after “Hello, Garci” spilled out and the country was astir, demanding she step down. She did not. She traipsed in the Luneta in white to proclaim her innocence. That is not katapangan, that is katapangan ng apog. Not surprisingly, the antic did not rouse public sympathy, it roistered public hostility.

Finally, government might have spared itself all its troubles if it had moved against Arroyo from Day One. Had it filed a case against Arroyo long ago, it would have avoided the kind of legal complications that came with the Supreme Court’s TRO. But better late than never. The arrest warrant against Arroyo has, as Court spokesman Jose Midas Marquez acknowledges, trumped the TRO, making it moot and academic.

P-Noy himself has proven he is far from the weakling his enemies have tried to make him out to be. When it comes to matters of fundamental national interest, he is unyielding, he is uncompromising, he is resolute. More than anything he has done, this is the one thing that shows he is perfectly serious in carrying out his campaign against corruption. This is his defining moment. He has been judged, and found full.

Not so the Supreme Court, which has proven yet again it has no right to exist. Above all Renato Corona, who continues to demonstrate why Arroyo appointed him beyond the bounds of duty and who clings to his position beyond the bounds of decency. The point is not that the Supreme Court has blinked in its confrontation with government, it is that it has put an obstacle in its path once more on so fundamental a matter as elemental justice. The courts are there to practice law in the grand manner, they are not there to advance technicalities. The Supreme Court most of all. The Arroyos committed a crime, they must be punished. The Arroyos committed a wrong, it must be righted. The Arroyos are trying to dodge the law, they must be stopped.

P-Noy is making sure they are. In the face of a TRO, he has just delivered a TKO.

Rule of law and public esteem

By: Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer

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The arrest the other day of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on charges of electoral sabotage has been hailed by those who seek to make her accountable for her past actions as the triumph of the rule of law. Her family, lawyers, and allies, on the other hand, have called her arrest a mockery of the law, drawing attention to the unusual haste in which the investigation was conducted, the charges were filed, and the arrest warrant issued. Though they see differently, both perspectives proceed from a legal standpoint. People think this is as it should be under the rule of law.

But, “rule of law” is a misnomer. The more accurate phrase would be “rule according to law.” For, law itself does not rule. Political power belongs to the political system. Law is there to regulate and check the use of this power – to make sure it is not abused. The effective exercise of this function, however, rests on the law’s ability to demonstrate its autonomy from politics, money, religion, family and other social ties. Otherwise, the legal system sheds off its legitimacy, which is the sole basis of the respect it commands.

Obviously, if political power can be abused, so can the interpretation of the law. In a democracy, the ultimate check on political abuse is the prospect of impeachment or punishment at the polls. But what is the check on the issuance of arbitrary orders by magistrates of the highest court? The answer is also impeachment, a political solution.

The reality, however, is that in a constitutional democracy, a nation seldom gets to the point of impeaching its justices. So desperate is the need to maintain the fiction of an impartial legal order, especially in young democracies, that a society will sooner turn a blind eye to the incompetence and lack of integrity in its judicial system than risk eroding the system’s credibility. That is how the rule of law comes to be equated with the rule of justices. When justices are corrupt and ignorant, this situation all too often translates into the rule of money and political favors. But, still, advocates of the rule of law would prescribe unconditional obedience to the courts rather than expose the corruption at the core.

It is this dysfunctional state of affairs that the Aquino government boldly challenged when it ignored the temporary restraining order issued by the Supreme Court allowing Arroyo to leave the country, despite the criminal cases facing her. The reasons offered by the Department of Justice were couched in legal terms: they wanted to see the actual written order itself rather than rely on media announcements by the court administrator. Later, the government said it wanted to see a document showing that the conditions for the TRO had been fully complied with. But it is clear to any observer that the government was defying the high court. This is unthinkable in societies where justices are held in higher esteem than politicians. Yet in a society that had seen how Ms Arroyo had deftly manipulated the legal system, it seemed the only sensible thing to do.

Some say that in doing so, the Aquino government risked plunging the country into a constitutional crisis. That may be so; I don’t know if there is a punishment for it that is worse than losing the presidency itself by an extra-constitutional route. I am sure P-Noy is aware of this. But it is important to note that this is still the price we are paying for having allowed unscrupulous politicians like the former president to pack the judiciary and the bureaucracy with unworthy individuals who swore to do her bidding in exchange for their appointments. All this is rooted in the reckless way we set aside the Constitution in 2001 to unseat a duly elected president who had violated public trust. Having installed her, the nation became hostage to Arroyo’s unceasing quest for political survival.

It is interesting that today Arroyo’s defenders loudly accuse the Aquino government of a gross lack of civility, decency, and compassion in the latter’s handling of the cases against the ailing former president. They were silent when the same moral values were being freely flouted during her presidency.

The public will not forget how GMA insisted on exercising the prerogative to name the new chief justice of the Supreme Court in the last weeks of her presidency, when, out of civility or courtesy, she should have left this choice to her successor who had already been elected.  They will remember how she named the palace gardener and her personal manicurist to government boards just before she stepped down from office in mindless disregard of their qualifications. Is this decent? Most of all, they have not forgotten how, after assuming the presidency in 2001 under doubtful circumstances, she caused the humiliating arrest and detention of the duly-elected president she had just deposed. Her arrogance and lack of compassion during that critical moment provoked an uprising by the urban poor who regarded the ousted Erap Estrada as their champion.

Yet, none of these brought Arroyo close to prison. Indeed, nowadays the punishment for moral lapses is no more than a loss of public esteem. And so, politicians like her are wont to think that public esteem is not as important as winning elections, wielding power, and staying out of jail. What they do not realize is that, when these battles are waged in public, in the full glare of media, nothing matters as much as public esteem. It is what gives substance to legal claims and political power. Too bad for GMA, she has none left that she can call upon now that she desperately needs it.

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