PUBLIC SERVICE NEED NOT BE FLAUNTED
by Senate President Vicente C. Sotto III
April 3, 2020

PUBLIC service is delivered even in the absence of still and rolling cameras. Community assistance does not and will never need megaphones or microphones to be authentic and sincere. In the din of silence, and in the shadow of crowds, there lies the true meaning of service to the people.

We, senators, have not simply been idly sitting in our homes. Each one of us have stepped out of our comfort zones and extended assistance to indigent and low-income families and workers who have been hit the most by the enhanced community quarantine and the COVID-19 pandemic. We, too, have been going around, checking out the condition of, and distributing much-needed health and food supplies to, our frontliners and essential workers. We have been doing our own brand of public service, but we have deliberately kept our deeds out of the coverage of panning cameras and away from the attention of the hard-working members of the media, lest we be accused of politicizing the crisis. We have always been around, but we are unlike some who constantly seek public applause for their every action even those which are actually just perfunctory.

If anyone wishes to know what have been our contributions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, all they need to do is ask. We will easily give them a detailed list of our actions. I repeat, all that they need to do is to ASK. There is no need to come up with those dramatic, teary-eyed, voice-breaking appeals uploaded on social media platforms. That is not only cheap, but it reeks so much of traditional politics.