Suffer the guilty

Before the 8th of September, no one had ever heard of Henry Alcantara and Brice Hernandez, but these days their names are always turning up on our screens.

They, of the so-called Bulacan Group of Contractors or BGC, as Senator Ping Lacson had hilariously tagged them, are being pilloried for their luxury purchases meant to razzle and dazzle.

It is these excesses that always get the guilty. I mean, who needs 28 luxury cars in a garage you probably have to air-condition? The husband-and-wife team of Curlee and Sarah Discaya do.

And who is going to salivate over that RM watch other than those fellow aficionados of extravagant timekeepers? I bet Richard Miller never wished to be tainted by even a whiff of corruption.

Still, RM and the rest of the top 10 of the world’s most coveted luxury watches very often end up on the wrists of the corrupt, for money never gets old and it has always blinded the powerful.

Back when Janet Napoles and her high-flying daughter were the targets of public ire, we became familiar with Porsches gifted to young daughters and apartments in New York that were uncovered by those seeking to know more about what happened to all that Priority Development Assistant Fund.

These days, the public is learning about Audemars Piguet, European jaunts, and apartments in Paris.

Not only that, we have the wife of a senator tagged as the world’s top buyer of Hermes bags — so much so that she can have the Singapore store closed for her shopping pleasure.

Who said Filipinos were poor? Maybe not those foreigners who did not wonder how one Filipino public official could afford to buy three houses in their country, one after the other.

What else can the world offer to these people who desire the very best, the finest, and the most expensive — at a cost to their kababayan, their country, and their reputations?

Perhaps, to wonder aloud like the President did recently, how we got to this point is because we are either too trusting or too stupid. Perhaps government leaders are too cunning and unprincipled. Perhaps it is too easy to plunder — and so they did.

There is no end to greed. The world was made to hold both good and evil, and people have a choice to go either way. If we choose not to do our part in bringing the corrupt to justice, if we let the theatrics get the better of us and forget that those BGC boys are only the easiest targets in what is likely a deep, dark pit of shame, then we choose to suffer. Suffer the guilty.