There is no let-up in the way the political abracadabra is being stage managed in the home country.
At this early, we already see the same division that has wreaked havoc on our national life and soul.
The announcement, for instance, by former President Corazon Aquino to join with the Susan Roces forces in the “march for truth”—a march masked by other mixed intents and purposes—is not symbolic of the needed respite from all the pelting of dirt by the elite to each other.
In this national drama, we have the same characters: those who have been there long before from the day the conquerors came, all of them—those families and clans and tribes who welcomed the foreign visitors who had come uninvited to these shores.
We make a listing of the characters and we realize that, indeed, we have been dealing with the same problems because we have been dealing with the same families and their privileged positions.
The list of controversies involving the privileged class of political elites is getting longer.
And now the bishops and priests and other characters have come in, their names and actuations dragged into the picture to form a bigger landscape of plots and counterplots.
The bishops and priests, it seems, have benefited from the government’s gambling business, if we are to base the assessment from reports.
To think that some of the bishops and priests and moral leaders are against jueteng and all other means to dupe the poor into believing that in the numbers game are the golden fingers of sunlight reaching out to their deep pockets—this set-up surprises us.
Some men-of-the-cloth cry foul—and some of them look the other way around and get the money from the lottery and the sweepstakes and the casinos and the slot machines.
Not to be outdone are the non-government organizations and cause-oriented groups that have received grants and other perks from government agencies, the government’s gambling agency included.
We can only second guess now.
Who among the elite political and economic class is not tainted with opportunism?
Who among the elite political and economic class is not a beneficiary of the unjust arrangements of the social structures?
Who among the elite political and economic class is crying foul because he is excluded from the privileges that are being given to the other members of the same class?
With these questions, we can proceed to ask a more fundamental question, “How can we bring about social justice for Juan or Juan dela Cruz and all those Filipinos who are dreaming of the best days ahead?”
While the division among the elite class gets deeper and deeper, there is that other social division that gets to uglier and uglier: The divide between those who have yet to receive the benefits of a just and fair society and those who have benefited from the present unjust social arrangements.
This is fundamental, for certain reasons: first, the country’s Constitution assures the pursuit of social justice for every Filipino; second, the elites can always take care of themselves—in fact, they have always taken care of themselves; third, the elites have not taken upon themselves to look after the other Filipinos whom they have successfully “othered” for a long, long while.
We can impute other intentions, thus, in this continuing theatre of the absurd: it is an endless project of “othering” by the elite class, with the least privileged calculated to remain less privileged because the calculus of common good has always been in the name of those who rule.
We demand that in the march for truth by the many forces demanding the resignation of the President Gloria Arroyo, there ought to be the march for the common good as well, the march for the common welfare—for social justice, for equality, for fairness.
And the elite class who will march ought to have an examination of self and conscience.
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