Truth, justice, and the Filipino way

The past few weeks, much has been said but little has been done about the nursing licensure exam scandal. It's been quite a while since the leakage of answers to certain portions of the test was uncovered, but several protest rallies, dozens of debates and hundreds of news pieces later, we still have thousands of unlicensed nurses whose fate remains in question. The Arroyo administration has flip-flopped so many times on the issue, they're giving Havaianas a bad name. "There will be no retake of the nursing board exam. No way, no how. Oh, hang on a sec, GMA changed her mind. There will definitely be a retake of the exam. Whoops, did we say retake? No, no, the case is still with the Court of Appeals, so we can't say anything at the moment." It's always reassuring when the government displays such firm, decisive resolve.

I've been following the news on the nursing board exam with more than my usual interest in current events (more so than the knee-jerk overreaction to the whole billboards brouhaha, which I find tiresome). It's always a gas to see our country's leaders' pathetic attempts at dealing with cheating, when we live in a culture that not only condones, but often rewards dishonesty and unscrupulous practices. It's like watching someone bailing water out of a sinking boat with a sieve. Personally, I believe there should be a retake, if only because the arguments for NOT having one are just too ridiculous. "Why punish the ones who took the test in the Visayas and Mindanao? Surely there was no way the leakage reached them!" Oh yeah, of course not. There are, after all, no such things as cell phones that could reach that one nursing student in Cebu whose boyfriend just happens to have a cousin who took nursing board exam review classes in Baguio. Inconceivable!

There is no foolproof way of ascertaining that the leak was contained to a minority of the test-takers. And even if the leak had reached only a handful of nurse hopefuls, the results of the entire exam are already tainted, and hence, invalidated-- including the results reached without the advantage of leaked test items. That is one hard-to-accept but necessary consequence of cheating: even if only a few commit it, the rest have to pay for it as well. Both the guilty and the innocent are punished... and that doubles (or in this case, magnifies by the thousand) the guilt of the cheaters. I truly feel sorry for those who did study their asses off to pass the exam, but I also wish some of them who are refusing to retake the exam would just quit whining already. Yes, you were not privvy to the items leaked. Yes, you really did technically pass the exam on your own merits. Yes, it's unfair. But it would be even more unfair NOT to have retake, to let some undeserving bum get away with cheating and obtain his nursing license (read: one-way ticket to the US of A). Your chances of getting hired by a hospital in the US are shot anyway, if there's no retake. So curse the cheaters all you want, but just retake the damn exam, not only because it's for your own welfare, but because it's the right thing to do. It's the just thing to do.

Justice is not always fair. We always confuse justice with fairness, or worse, mercy (that's like saying love and romance are one and the same). We Filipinos are soft-hearted shmucks by nature, so whenever someone screws up, forgiveness is always expected. The philandering husband. The corrupt politician. The tax-evading celebrity. The doping athlete. We grow up in an environment where cheating is punished by nothing more than a slap on the wrist, glossed over by the most lame excuses: "it was a moment of weakness" or "he didn't know better" or "she was merely coerced" or "there were mitigating circumstances" (the latter being my personal favorite). We're so used to pardoning liars and cheats, we tend to turn a blind eye to all other acts of questionable morals or ethics. It's like, we might as well skip the trouble of conducting a thorough investigation and subjecting the suspect to public scrutiny and/or censure. What's the point, if we all know he's going to get off the hook anyway?

Thus, you don't hear much about the NBI's ongoing hunt for the source of the nursing exam leak, or the UAAP digging for the people behind the fake academic papers of the 2 LaSalle basketball players, or the government exerting any effort to discover the real identity of either Jose Velarde or Jose Pidal (the fact that it took you a couple of seconds to recognize those names proves my point), or a renewed attempt to get to the bottom of those accursed "Hello, Garci" tapes. After the initial furor has died down, and given a conveniently distracting side issue (retake the exam!) or a development masquerading as a solution (DLSU suspended for one year! Erap impeached! GMA apologized!) it doesn't matter anymore who the mastermind was, which accomplices were involved, and how the devious plan was carried out (you get more concrete conclusions from a game of Clue-- "It was Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick!"). We Filipinos are not interested in pinning blame, or assigning responsibility to the guilty parties, much less punishing them for it. Maybe it's because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, or we're just pacifists by nature, or we don't want to inconvenience anyone. Or maybe we're just too lazy and apathetic to give a shit. Or maybe we've been burned one too many times before. Maybe we're just tired, and jaded.

The truth may set us free, but tragically, we seem to prefer captivity in ignorance and deception.