Siftings
And off they go!
To the finish line! But the way things are turning up and turning out these days, just four days to May 10, the elections may just be declared a failure. And so, should the hated, mistrusted sitting president be declared President – for life, to avoid a hiatus in power? A not-so-impossible scenario, considering she is set to appoint the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the military–whose Chief of Staff she recently appointed is a close ally–are being deployed to and augmented in every part of the country; and the two Ampatuans recently released from prison by the Secretary of Justice are now free to sow terror in Maguindanao, etc., etc.
Are we as a people going to let all these happen? Tama na, sobra na. Kung hindi tayo kikilos, kailan pa? Kung hindi tayo, sino pa? Echoes of such beset my mind as I sit before my TV screen, appalled by the enormity of the possibility of a failure of elections staring Filipinos in the face in the 11th hour of the run-up to May 10.
And this morning, the INC endorsement of the Noy-Mar tandem was announced A major victory. The orange crowd must be livid with rage. But they have the 3 so-called “Kings”: Kings of babaeros: the show-host womanizer and 2x suspendee for anti-women actions on his variety show in the past; an aging comedian who, despite his legion of offspring, has never legally married a woman; and a billionaire-boxer recently linked to a starlet whose endorsement on TV is a hit below the belt against a candidate who has never done him any wrong, imagined or real, basi nahisa lang siya kay ang nanay sinang kandidato isa ka martyr sang pungsod kag ang iya nanay isa ka trying-hard kaladlawan who looks, according to many people, daw isa ka agi, with apologies to the gays.
But I am diverting from my main point.
The way I see it, Noynoy’s campaign from the moment he decided to seek the presidency was going to run on a promise of a return to no less than the innocence we lost after Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972. The innocence in the dawn of creation? A Utopia of a past era, when politics was a political commitment of public service and political conduct was carried on with palabra de honor, delicadeza, and amor propio? Those days, when a scandal-brushed government agency would have its head immediately resigning with a public apology, whether he was guilty or not! Those days when a politician’s image had to be squeaky clean, when a breath of scandal could mean the kiss of death to a politician’s career.
Noynoy’s winning the presidency may pave the way for a return to an old way of governing, in which the rule of law, of decency, of ethics, of moral ascendancy will be the norm, as it was in the days of Quezon, Roxas, Osmeña – my late father’s generation of leaders who were the heroes we once admired and emulated.
Maybe those days are gone forever with the wind of an era that will not pass this way again. But we can wish, can’t we, in the hope that we can breathe clean air, air untainted by the murky mists and obnoxious, death-dealing fumes of greed, corruption, the absence of honesty, fair dealing, and integrity? And as I write this, tears suddenly sting my eyes with nostalgia and something like pain.
But Noynoy’s particular charisma works that way – that he makes us think those days can be brought back, if only to offer a clean-up of governing processes, a cleaner view of what governing is all about, a straighter path of governance free of the burdens of kickbacks, padded budgets, overpriced prospects ad nauseam.
All the other candidates, with the exception of the non-trapos and the lone female contender, have the stigma of the trapo reputation and are perceived to go into the now acceptable opus operandi of the wheeling and dealing mode when they get the position. A successful businessman-billionaire now tainted with possible economic plunder due to the substandard low-cost houses he built for government housing projects which were later abandoned by residents and for which the government was never paid back by the recipients.
Shades of one reason the US economy started its downward slide in 2007-2008. One could see houses then being abandoned, with For Sale signs on their fences in the subdivisions, attesting to the fact that somehow, somewhere, somebody reneged on payments that had to be paid while the realtors and developers got paid and got rich, while the US government was left holding the bag, c/o banks and financing agencies and investment houses going bankrupt. Which the US government had to bail out to prop up the economy.
Is this what happened in the rags-to-riches story of this billionaire candidate with the cold reptilian eyes that shows no compassion, despite his claims to the contrary about the poor? Ano ang ginhimo niya sa Tondo poor?
As the days wind down to Monday, May 10, and the weaknesses of the PCOS machines keep popping up without let-up, we can only look up to heaven and offer up a prayer:
Lord, please help our beloved nation battle this, the most crucial test of our existence as a democracy. Lord, please help us overcome the evils that live in the hearts of evil men. Amen.
