NOTES FROM SIR RAMON

Dear ALL,

I have been receiving a lot of e-mails from various people in the Order (despite my being a non-active member) and I am grateful for all of them in including me in their mailing list.

I have refrained from getting involved on issues I barely have knowledge about so I opted to keep my peace.

All I know is that I know Sir Rizal Victoria personally. We have met often when at the erstwhile Philippione Embassy in Bonn, Germany we were both officers of our respective associations. I knew him to be vocal on relevant issues and he spoke his mind out without fear or favor, or to put it succinctly, he did not fear speaking the truth as he honestly believed them to be - the hallmark of an intelligent and informed person.

I do not write favorable words for him because I personally know him. I write from my heart and from my humble but honest perspective of the fair and the just.

Sir Rizal has been living here in Germany for along time and is married to his German wife. Being a fast learner he easily absorbed the German dictum "Ich sage was ich denke," bereft of the diplomatic niceties and words that are usually laced and coated with sugar but bitter in the inside. That is never his style. He would call a spade a spade no matter who gets hurt and the truth sadly almost always hurts.

The problem with what we love to call civil society is that, as I have observed, people do not want to speak about evil so as to make them non-existent. They see and hear evil but they do nothing to erase it from the very society it menaces. Many people choose to remain silent for fear of offending those who commit evils in their very midst. In the process, they condone the culprit and this become unconscious participant in the commission of evil acts.

They chose to remain silent for fear perhaps of disturbing the status quo or the feeling of shame if the dirt is exposed to the outside world and for fear of invitng external forces to destroy the seemingly calm and inner peace wrapped in the facade of disguised harmony.

In the end, this attitude of many to cover up the anomalies would be a self-destruct mechanism that would certainly weaken the establishment like a building which parts are being eaten up by termites or members who are really liabilities than assets.

I have met a number of people from Belgium and Holland during regular sports competitions among Filipinos where we German Filipinos are regular participants. I have made a quiet inquiries about the people Sir Rizal are complaining against and the opinions they gave me about the character of those people seemed to confirm what Sir Rizal has been saying all along.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Order, look at what has been happening in the Philippines. Whistleblowers or people who expose the anomalies they have seen that have been committed by persons close to the powers-that-be are themselves either being imprisoned, publicly humiliated, killed, fired from their jobs, and worse, being killed to silence them forever.

Think it over.

In the name of justice, truth and fairness
I am Respectfully yours,
Ramon Mayuga
Essen, Germany