Fish bowl

There is a problem with Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla saying it does not matter whether a son of the President was the victim of an allegedly recidivist road-raging governor, Bulacan province’s Daniel Fernando, and his supposed convoy of thugs while motoring down the North Luzon Expressway.

The issue is not with Remulla’s premise, which rests on the familiar legal axiom that everyone is equal before the law, particularly those who hold public office and are expected to understand that it is not enough to be clean but necessary to be seen as such.

That expectation, often referred to as the Caesar’s Wife Test, has long fallen out of fashion in a country burdened by routine corruption and selective outrage, where principles are invoked only when they prove useful.

What complicates matters is that Malacañang earlier went out of its way to deny that a young Marcos was involved in the incident, an encounter that according to some reports ended with the governor and his bodyguards abruptly recalibrating their behavior after realizing they had badly misjudged the balance of power.

A pundit even suggested that the governor then went uncharacteristically quiet, retreating from the limelight he once sought as a B movie actor, amid speculation that he had been reminded, in no uncertain terms, that there were limits to how far his swagger could travel.

Fernando has since surfaced at a public event, visibly unmarked and offering no sign of physical harm, but he has remained notably silent about the episode itself. That silence has done little to calm speculation and has instead reinforced the sense that the rules change depending on who is involved.

The Palace may be given the benefit of the doubt, but there would have been little harm in acknowledging that if one of the President’s sons was indeed the target of the supposed harassment, complete with a bodyguard allegedly brandishing a firearm, the episode would have amounted to a familiar story of a big fish setting out to devour fingerlings only to discover a larger predator in the same waters.

That, after all, is how the world tends to work. It is eat or be eaten, and size, along with its close companions wealth and power, usually determines who ends up on the plate. The difficulty is that the tank is not level. Some fish swim behind thicker glass, protected by circumstance and connections, while others move through the water knowing instinctively that no one is coming to intervene on their behalf.

This is where stature stops being incidental and becomes decisive, measured not by physical size alone but by the weight of a surname, the reach of an office, the convoy trailing behind a windshield, and the number of men whose livelihoods depend on not seeing anything at all.

That is impunity. It does not need to be declared because everyone already understands how it works. Some rules are enforced, others are quietly waived, and the law maintains the appearance of neutrality while still recognizing exactly whose face it is confronting.

This is why Senator JV Ejercito’s recent warning to the Philippine National Police Highway Patrol Group carries meaning beyond traffic management.

Ejercito has threatened budget cuts if HPG personnel continue to worsen Metro Manila congestion by escorting any VIP who demands a convoy, noting that as many as 20 to 30 such motorcades move through the city during rush hour, sirens clearing roads and making a mockery of traffic laws.

Here, too, impunity takes a familiar form, with public authority on the taxpayer payroll quietly reassigned from service to convenience. It explains why motorists tense at the sound of police motorcycles, why intersections fall silent when convoys approach, and why equality before the law so often dissolves behind tinted glass.

At some point, those who keep getting drunk on power should be taken out of the community tank altogether and left to swim alone in a fish bowl of their own making.