Weird logic.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Conrado de Quiros

ONE TV station had a curious commentary about the transport strike last week. A TV personality was interviewing a government official who seemed perfectly reasonable. The official's tone was pleading. She understood that jeepney and bus drivers had every right to strike, she said, but she wished they would refrain from coercion and violence. They had every right to stop plying their routes and ask other drivers to join them, but they had no right to stop buses and jeepneys on the streets and force the drivers to join them.

She showed a picture of a bus that had been turned on its side and lamented it. Ultimately, she said, coercion and violence were counterproductive. It merely turned the public, who might otherwise sympathize with the drivers, against them. She blamed the militants who had joined the strike for that lapse into anarchy. She dearly wished, she said, the legitimate strikers would not allow themselves to be swayed by outside elements.

The interviewer seized on the last thought. Yes, he said, the hand of outside elements seemed patent in the strike. It was to be seen in its very demands. He produced a leaflet the drivers had been handing out and then went through the strikers' list of demands. These included higher fare rates, increases in workers' pay generally, rollback of oil prices, rollback of power rates, the prosecution of corrupt government officials.

The call for higher fare rates and the rollback of oil prices, the interviewer said, seemed well within the province of the strike. But such things as power rates and corruption were not. Maybe they could be the subject of another strike, but not this one. Clearly, he said, this was the handiwork of outside elements, the same outside elements that fomented the violence at Hacienda Luisita.

Well, first off, the part about violence and coercion. I agree entirely, they are counterproductive. I said the same thing some 15 years ago when striking bus and jeepney drivers, who were calling for a rollback of oil prices, burned buses in the provinces. I called the people who burned the buses goons. And I had a heated exchange with the late Popoy Lagman as a result of it.