by Diego Morra
As the nation gears up for the celebration of All Souls Day, it is not only fitting to remember the departed, it is likewise important for the living to look into how they comport themselves from the time they were born to the time they have to depart. As one poet described it, the dash between the date of birth and the date of demise should be the basis for determining whether someone led a wholesome life, or scuppered it altogether for the sheer greed for power and pelf.
That dash indicates the arrival and departure, and covers the life work of someone. It is the dash that starts in 1978 for Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, when she was born to the couple Elizabeth Zimmerman and Rodrigo Duterte. Once can be measured by how the departed used his dash and poet Linda Ellis’ copyrighted piece “The Dash” has been recited in countless funerals since 1996. The dash embodies a compete performance and there is no encore for this unique show. Will Sara make peace with the marauding devils that occupy her cerebrum and cast away all the lies thus far disseminated to misinform and delude the Filipino people on her culpability for maintaining hidden wealth that lawyer and forensic analyst Alex Cabrera estimated conservatively to be at least P871.71-million at most P1.5-billion.
To avoid getting sued for reading or reciting Ellis’ poem, Sara might just as well recite tonight and tomorrow Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem,” which reads: “Under the wide and starry sky/Dig the grave and let me lie/Glad did I live and gladly die/And I laid me down with a will///This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be/Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.” How will Sara eulogize the departed while in real life she has been throwing her own father, her brother Baste, her own husband Mans and everybody else just to wiggle herself out of the impeachment trap she had plunged herself into?
There is a Latin phrase for the brevity of life, its mirth and its harshness, and the lesson, shared by the Scripture and the Torah, that one must make the most of it: Pulvis et umbra sumus—- We are dust and shadow. But before Sara contemplates about her mortality, or immortality as her solipsistic reality, she has to contend with the reality that she has to contend with her defense and her date with the daunting task is on Nov. 9, 2026. After whining about her fears that assassins are on the prowl to do her in, with the courts, the police, the Senate and Congress, as well as the elevators and stairs, conspiring to end her triumphant march to Malacanang in 2028, she eventually sought succor from the Supreme Court (AC) to throw her grave threats case. The High Court dumped her plea.
However, Sasa is a prisoner of the present, a detainee in a space open and wide, for she has failed to read the room, that all her arguments for her perceived persecution cannot save her from her own submissions before the Senate impeachment court. As one wag said: “Ignorance has never looked so confident.” Surely, Sara would visit the graves of the victims of Davao City bombings but she would find it beneath her dignity to spend a second saying a prayer, or Kaddish, if you will, for even one of the 30,000 victims of the “tokhang” war. All those photo ops about planting tree seedlings, visiting graves and doing her lachrymal scenes from a script by her image makers mean nothing when ranged about her record of indolence in the past four years, her being absent when people were drowning by the successive typhoons “Crising,” “Emong” and “Dante” in July 2025 and her journey to Germany to watch a Taylor Swift concert as “Carina” battered Luzon in 2024 proved to all and sundry that empathy is not in her vocabulary. Yet, she uses social media to even brag how she can fudgel her way at the DepEd and Office of the Vice President (OVP.)
Neither will she be predisposed to take time out for a photo opportunity in remembering the thousands of extra-judicial killings (EJKs) perpetrated by Rodrigo Duterte’s brownshirts against workers and peasants since 2018 through Executive Order No. 70, which created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and Memorandum Circular No. 32 that brought the military and police to expand the bloodbath in Negros Island, the Bicol region and Leyte and Samar provinces. Her record of suppressing workers and peasants in Davao City speaks eloquently of her visceral hatred of dissidents and human rights advocates.
After howling egregiously that the impeachment trial is a conspiracy against her presidential franchise, Sara has been plastering the newspapers, radio and TV stations with the results of two-month-old surveys that seek promote the illusion that curb-stoning surveys show that the Filipino people do not trust a fair impeachment trial and verdict. Of course, Social Weather Stations (SWS) and Pulse Asia have become identified with the Duterte camp, with Sen. Bong Go rumored to be the majority owner of the latter along with a rarely-read broadsheet., which have been dishing out photos of Go’s supposedly charitable actions. If you can’t hack it in the Senate, can you earn brownie points from fire victims?
Now, Sara will have to contest the reality that she cannot accuse House prosecutors of manufacturing documents, all of which were collected from 30 accounts in eight commercial banks, as well as tax records from the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), corporate submissions from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the suspected transactions and covered transactions culled by the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC.) Sara’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Ne Worth (SALNs) are official records, including her dubious declarations of owning businesses, winning contracts from the Davao City government and even being paid P3-million by the city even when she was already vice president. Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro said the evidence gathered and against Vice President Sara Duterte — particularly the bank and tax records under Article II — are documents that came from her camp. In short, the evidence incriminated Sara herself. She forgot that the impeachment proceedings were being conducted at the Senate and not in Davao City. Some people are, to the Germans, really “Geboren um bose zu sein.” Born to be bad. #