This endless resurrection of charter change as the panacea to what ills the Philippines has become a nameless menace.
It is nameless because we do not know how to call this strategy of the administration people and their allies of defining the problem of the Philippines as caused by the 1987 Constitution that was supposed to have enshrined the best of our ideals after that collective act of redeeming ourselves from the hell that we had to go through during the Marcos misrule.
It is a menace because here we go again with this social malady of purging that evil that is in the heart and soul of our pretending leaders.
The rite and ritual that go with this charter change will serve as some kind of a decoration to the already useless pageantry of elections.
For soon we will elect the assemblymen—and women—in that unicameral body that would serve as the preserver of our democratic ideals.
These assembly persons—how will we call them to make our term politically correct?—will understand what we want as a people because by the time the elections will be called, they shall have read all the provisions of the New Constitution.
And they then shall have taken to heart everything that is in there.
Every word. Verbatim.
And then the New Constitution of 2007 will challenge them to forget their past as members of the House of Representative and the Senate because they are to be one, their action concerted, and their minds gelling because guided by the vision of that New Fundamental Law of the Land to effect social justice, at least, on paper.
This is where the big trouble begins.
We dare say: unless all the pretending leaders and pretending politicians will go away from the elections, shun their participation in the constitution of the assembly that will be called for, and take on obligatory and voluntary banishment in one of the unpopulated islands of the Philippines and there ruminate about the terrorizing and tormenting silence of the poor and the oppressed, this whole idea of charter change is going to be simply a waste of tax money.
It will simply be another one of those foolish social experiments of changing Constitutions without changing those who author the nameless menace that we have around.
There is a single sine qua non to what we can do: Write another charter, for heaven’s sake and if that is what addresses some of the issues that relate to some face-saving needs of some powers-that-be but for the sake of the people long deprived of what is due them, ban all the present politicians from participating in the electoral exercise.
Put in one of the provisions that those who are presently holding power cannot aspire to hold power for one generation.
If we need to purge our political life and we do it by changing the Constitution, then let us also purged those who continue to make our life miserable.
Fair is fair.
Pub, INQ, V1N20, Nov 2005
Running Around In Circles
There is a need to define the Filipino problem with urgency and definitiveness.
There is one thing that is clear at this time: we cannot keep on running around in circles.
We cannot permit this act of running around in circles to govern our lives and give us direction in the management of our public life.
We cannot allow this rite of running around in circles as if this is what sanctifies us as a people.
We cannot go on with this ritual of running around in circles as if this is what has been decreed by the gods as part of our punishment for sporting the name Filipinos.
Somewhere along the way, we have to stop, think, and revisit that which ails us, that which makes us at a disadvantage, that which makes us celebrate our smallness, our insularity.
We need to stop blaming on our country’s geography and topography: that we are made of up of islands and that we think in terms of the barrio and the purok and the clan and the family, that the soil is not fertile enough, that the seas are not giving us enough fish, that the leaders are not leading enough, that we are not praying enough.
All these are rationalizations—all false reasoning that appear to be true because we have been conditioned to think these are all true.
Our being insular is a non-issue.
Our ancestors looked at the seas and these vast waters as highways that they could navigate to reach out to each other and make commerce. They did this in their own rickety-rickety rafts and mano-mano bancas and vintas and here we are saying that we cannot bridge the divide between islands?
The key here is going beyond our islands in order to reach out to the other islands.
Unless one is a true-blue politician with all the resources of his office from the people’s money at his disposal, we cannot afford to keep on ensconced in our insular shells and think in terms of our islands, barrios, clans, puroks.
Our ancestors will laugh at us and will say to say to us that their soft technology—their knowledge and intelligence—was better than us despite our cellies, computers, and trillions of annual budgets.
Include here our penchant for political braggadocio and our capacity for callousness of the needs of the impoverished, we cannot come up with a counter-argument to dismiss the imaginary judgment of those who came before us about our collective inutility.
The clue to get out of this rut is to name this nameless menace—to christen it with courage and daring.
We can indict the actors of this foolish game of politics by coming up with an accounting of their deeds and misdeeds.
We get the list and we begin with their liabilities from A to Z.
Who are those who have owed us an apology, a sincere one, not dramatized, and not rehearsed for television and for the other media arts?
Who are those who have promised so much but did not do enough to fulfill that promise?
Who are those who are passing them off as capable but cannot distinguish public service from self-interest?
Who are those whose imagination is as pampelikula as those of some B-rate actors’—those who are passing themselves off as heroes in film as in real public office?
Who are those who are capitalizing on their self-inflicted misery, shame and embarrassment to catapult themselves to power and, by stroke of the masa’s ignorance, get themselves elected to office only the decent and the self-respecting are supposed to occupy?
Who are those who lent their hand and name to shame us and make us politically dumb during the dark days of dictatorship but now bouncing off as if they are our bundles of joy and the saviors we have been waiting for so long?
Who are those who inherited lands and now have the temerity to talk about social justice when in their own backyard they cannot even translate the basic requisites of social justice into action but make use of the loopholes of the law to justify their action of delaying justice to those who deserve most?
Who are those who keep on mouthing slogans we need to hear sometimes in order to assure us that we want those ideals but not those who are mouthing them?
Who are those whose ambition has been to occupy the highest offices of the land in order to wield power and accumulate more wealth for the benefit of their own grandchildren’s grandchildren but only for their own grandchildren’s grandchildren?
Some say that we have not been lucky to be born as Filipinos.
Here we go metaphysical—and this gives as an alibi for our incompetence.
It is not because we are Filipinos.
This is not even a wild excuse.
It is because we have not tried enough to become Filipinos.
This is the problem—and we have to define it as such.
Among the political elites, there is the convenient and voluntary amnesia in them. Power and wealth and entitlement make them forget who they are.
Among the middle class and enlightened masa, there is that collective sacrifice in them just to prove and demonstrate that they are Filipinos and they are trying their best to be so.
One proof is the remittance that comes from them—from the many that are eking it out in foreign shores to make the economy afloat. We need not look far.
Another proof is the sacrifice that the many will have to put in this Expanded Value Added Tax. We are afraid that so much of that which will be collected from the poor will go to the pockets of the political elites.
Perhaps there is a way to make do without this bad showmanship in governance?
Pub, INQ, V1N20, Nov 2005
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