Paid Hacks

Among friends and students, I remain the only one with a Jurassic mobile phone. It's four years old, and I have no plans of buying a new one.

Aside from being frugal, of course, I keep my phone because I use it for only two reasons: calling and text messaging. My prepaid card of P500 lasts me three months. I receive very few text messages, I have a separate digi-cam, and I avoid calling anyone because of tinnitus—I hear hiss and buzz over voices—so I use the land line.

But yesterday, I suddenly got again (?) one of those vicious messages from an unknown source. It was in Filipino and full of malice, agitating simple folks like me to hate the government. I didn't want to waste my time replying to it, but my fingers moved and texted back, “Please stop this nonsense! I love this country and I want it to succeed!”

Every so often, I (and so do my friends and family) receive this type of text message—an ugly voice that breeds intrigue, maligning our president in particular, and uncaring about its adverse effect on the country in general.

“I wonder why this person does this?” I asked Tony.

“Oh, he's probably a paid hack,” he replied nonchalantly.

“Paid by whom?”

“Text brigades are on the loose,” he explained. “I get those messages all the time. Even prior to the election, P-Noy was already the punching bag, but he got elected in landslide vote anyway. Nobody takes those messages seriously.”

“But someone can! If you plant a wretched seed in someone's wretched head repeatedly, one day it will grow into a wretched tree.”

“Not if you ignore it,” he dismissed.

I can't; I can't see why people enjoy destroying instead of building. If this country falls, we all fall.

The Bible is clear on this. James 4:11-12 (NLT): “Don’t speak evil against each other . . . If you criticize and judge each other, then you are criticizing and judging God’s law. But your job is to obey the law, not to judge whether it applies to you. God alone, who gave the law, is the Judge. He alone has the power to save or to destroy. So what right do you have to judge your neighbor?” 

God alone is the Judge. I pray that paid hacks may embrace this, so they could better appreciate His grace and turn to building instead of destroying.