By Haidee V. Eugenio
IF you think babies are the only ones with short attention span, think again. Adults, too, have this characteristic.
A person gets into a hobby of collecting stamps. He reads books, magazines and any publication that dwells on the history of stamps, and how people successfully came up with a collection of stamps from all over the world and from time immemorial. He buys plenty of stamps that are worth a fortune. He goes to great length traveling to places or writing to people from other regions of the world to get more stamps. Then once his first stamp album is filled, he loses interest and develops a new hobby—say, gardening and growing orchids. The stamp collection is turned over to his wife or kids.
Elected government officials also have short attention span.
Before, during and right after elections, they will promise a great deal of things—from economic and political reforms to keeping their promises.
But along the way, they will develop some kind of amnesia and moved on to other hobbies like frequent junkets and pushing for unnecessary appropriations for their electoral districts just to “pay them back” for voting them into office.
Last January, the new administration pitched for stricter austerity measures, but it still approved unnecessary travel requests and certified salaries that exceeded the cap for its appointees.
The spate of poker establishment robberies and murders which so absorbed the public, the elected leaders and the police force and hugged the headlines, the editorial columns and became the subject of politicians’ sweet promises of putting them to an end—all tend to be forgotten.
The attention now focuses on other “more interesting” things—sanctioning the excessive salaries of the past administration’s employees; finding out who really instigated the failed Senate coup; calling on the Office of the Public Auditor to investigate senators whose office accounts include wages for their spouses, kids and friends; finding out the persons that Speaker Heinz S. Hofschneider was referring to when he said his critics “need some education”; insisting that Health Secretary James U. Hofschneider’s $140,000 annual salary should be reduced (which should not have been a problem if some legislators who are complaining today did so during the confirmation hearings); and getting to know where Gov. Juan N. Babauta was on the Fourth of July and at the height of typhoon Chataan.
This short attention span is probably the reason why the government is not putting much mental effort on a long-term economic strategy for the CNMI.
When the multi-million-dollar garment industry leaves the CNMI, what other industries would be developed aside from tourism? What steps should the government take to cushion the impact of the garment industry’s pullout?
Now that the garment firms would no longer be here in the next few years, some government officials want to get more from them by raising the user’s fee. Why didn’t they do that from the start, so the CNMI should have gotten more money to spend on education, health and public safety services?
It’s hard to plan for the CNMI’s tomorrow, but it’s more exciting to plot political maneuvers in preparation for the next elections.
Because of the elected leaders’ short attention span, they are impatient with long-range economic programs. When they have to sacrifice, they want to see immediate results.
Task forces are created but after a while it’s not surprising to hear somebody say, “This isn’t working; let’s scrap this.” Or, “Let’s kick him out, he’s not working.” Then everybody agrees.
When a multi-million-dollar project is proposed, some of officials will court the wealthiest bidders that may not necessarily be the best ones to undertake the project and cover this collusion later on when the project is scrapped.
The next time somebody tells you that you have a short attention span, don’t think it’s a compliment. It means you are incapable of focusing and concentrating, and that you do not have the intellectual depth to see things through their end. And that you are either dumb or has amnesia.
