Metro Manila’s current sense and sensibleness

So soon after an explosion of apparently senseless violence, somehow Metro Manilans reached out and managed to touch each other’s well-concealed humanity. Thus, when Pulse Asia and the Philippine STAR ran the post-Labor Day survey on May 4, 2001, the popular spirit of serious peacemaking and sincere reconciliation could not be missed.

Asked about the most important things the Arroyo Administration must do to forestall a recurrence of the Labor Day demonstration, Metro Manilans endorsed bonding measures involving dialogues and collaborative efforts initiated by the administration with the political opposition and other organized – especially the poor, anti-administration – groups, and conciliatory gestures like allowing ousted President Estrada to be placed under house arrest rather than be detained in some jail, however comfortable the latter might be made to be. All these measures comprised the proponents’ liberal sense and found support from 52 percent to 76 percent of those interviewed in the survey.

On the other hand, those who advocated more severe alternatives could not muster more than 14 percent to 29 percent public support in advising the Arroyo administration to go for a public display of its military and police support, to charge, arrest and immediately jail anyone linked to the May First demonstration, and to track down, arrest and jail any person who actually joined the protest action. None of these hardline measures earned a majority endorsement from any group, including those groups that had been publicly identified as being anti-Estrada or pro-administration. Neither those people from the best-off class ABC nor those who either had some college or who graduated from college could be coaxed into being more supportive of these relatively severe measures.

It is possible to have a deeper appreciation of the public’s aversion to a hardline approach to whatever issues the Labor Day demonstration provoked among the citizenry. One could gather all the survey respondents whose recommendations for avoiding another Labor Day violence were uniformly liberal – that is to say, those respondents who chose to recommend only the first three liberal alternatives identified above and none of the three relatively more severe alternatives. Their foil would be other respondents who recommended only the second set of hardline alternatives. The final batch of respondents would be those who selected a mix of choices, combining some of the hardline with some of the liberal prescriptions.

Given this categorization, one finds that while 45 percent of the survey respondents identify only with purely liberal recommendations and 49 percent entertain mixed prescriptions, a mere five percent opt for hardline alternatives in preventing another violent demonstration against the national administration. Even among the anti-Estrada class ABC where the majority (57 percent) propose a cocktail of liberal and hardline recommendations, those who are exclusively liberal (36 percent) outnumber those who believe solely in hardline resolutions ( seven percent) by more than five to 1. Among the youngest respondents 18 to 24 years old, those who have completed a college education and those working in the private sector, a similar liberal advantage is also noticeable. No sociodemographic group in the Pulse Asia-Philippine STAR survey has more than 15 percent of its members preaching a gospel of severity.

Metro Manilans definitely sense the need of the times to be one of bonding and healing. A nation can go through only so much rivening without imperilling its basic sense of community. Thus, the Arroyo administration post-Labor Day policies of reaching out to the marginalized whose demonstrated capacity for outrage has become frighteningly real – as well as other policies which try to involve opposition figures in the critical task of bridging a deteriorating sociopolitical cleavage within the citizenry – are much in order. They are reflective of a welcome sensibleness among those who wield political power in this country.

The administration’s decision to lift its imposed state of rebellion in Metro Manila, the open acknowledgment by the religious and the best-off that they indeed had neglected the welfare of the poor and must "reconsecrate" themselves and their church to this laudable objective and, finally, the poor’s current willingness to abide by the authorities’ dicta and desist from violent means of effecting social change – all of these are sensible developments that allow for greater optimism among people who would build a just and, therefore, enduring society.