Again, darkness at noon? / Yes, abolish the ROTC

Is there a way out? All around you, you hear the beat of muffled drums, deformed clocks in the shadows ticking away, and you have the dread feeling your world shrinks by the day. The peso has hit a six-month low at P53.71 to the US dollar, and that’s all you need to know the world of yesterday is no more. And what was the world of yesterday? Yesterdays? Just three years ago, the peso was hitting P25 to the dollar, before that P20 and P15 and long, long before that when I started out in journalism — two pesos to one dollar.

So where and when does the peso stop depreciating against the dollar? At 55, at 60 to one? More?

Nobody really knows, not even government financial and currency experts who put on a smile broad as a dormitory, say not to worry, the peso will rebound, everything will be all right soon. Oh, yeah? Everything will not be all right soon. In fact, things will get worse, and I am even afraid to ponder what will happen between now and the year 2004. I had hoped President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo would stay the course. Today, I give her a 50-50 chance and the odds — depending on events — could get worse a month or two from now.

Monday, July 23, she delivers her first State of the Nation Address (SONA) under very depressing, discouraging circumstances.

Virtually the whole of organized labor will be on strike, and there we touch one of the rawest nerves in our society today. Organized labor was a huge, upraised fist in People Power II, the social catapult that brought GMA to Malacañang. This alone would be a brass gong struck in the night. But when you recall that only last May 1, no less than 50,000 poor for the first time in our history laid siege on Malacañang — then you have it, that claw in your lung. Those ice cubes up and down your spine.

Gloria is going against the historic tide.

The poor have burst through their gunny sack and no longer agree to be dirt-poor. When and if they move again in the future, they will move as a whirlwind, and woe to the nation’s leaders for they are now a great force, 30 to 40 percent of the population, realizing for the first time they could have the power to break their chains. And they have strong allies, the forces of the Left, yes, organized labor who through the power of the strike can slash the soft underbelly of the Arroyo presidency. At a time a shrinking economy can least afford it.

What the president could have done to avoid this crisis was negotiate, look for a compromise, whittle down labor’s P125 demand as additional to the P250 daily wage. But no, GMA was adamant, she was pressured more by big business’s warnings that more factories would close, tens of thousands of workers would be laid off. Hers were the instincts of a classical economist. She failed to rise to the stature of a statesman in parlous times, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s (so close to our situation today), FDR turned his back on Wall Street to take the side of the poor, the oppressed, the jobless. He had to banish their fear. He "sailed by the stars", mindful of the "explosive forces lying under the surface" of American society. In FDR, that society had the leader to match the crisis. In GMA. I am sorry to say, we do not have that leader (or she has yet to rise to that stature) who can bring our storm-battered ship to port.

We had thought our May 11 national elections would straighten up a lot of things. They did not. They were elections just like the long caravan of past elections, a carnival of surface exuberance, weighed down even more by the fact that Puwersa ng Masa brought to the Upper Chamber senators loyal to the man — Joseph Estrada — who brought ruin to the country, was impeached and is now being tried for plunder and other serious charges. It’s politics as usual, money politics, tradpol politics, politics of the Golden Calf, politics of the money-lenders at the temple. Bandido politics.

GMA’s biggest blunder was to get the military establishment as her shield against the world. She should have drawn more legitimacy and more power from People Power II. But the middle class and leftist hordes frightened her because she was never trained in the disciplines and the passions of republicanism. She is completely at ease with her secretary of defense Angel Reyes whose erstwhile idol was Joseph Ejercito Estrada. Gahd!

Gloria, learn this. The global world, which draws on technology, brainpower, information, the forward planks of economic culture, the cast-iron base that is education – has long thrown out the military as a viable source of national leadership. It is there to maintain law and order, and that is all. The military is a complete stranger to the locomotive of democracy which it does not understand because it is a hierarchical organization based on discipline. And barked commands. And the manuals of war.

So, Mrs. President, you have mortgaged yourself and that is bad. Get out of that shield while you still can and conduct yourself as a commander-in-chief the way Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi did, drawing a line in the ground and telling the military not to trespass. Ramon Magsaysay didn’t have much of an education but he had leadership, the physical presence of twelve tanks. Without kowtowing to the military, he vanquished the Huk rebellion, a rebellion much greater in scope than that arrant and revolting sneeze — the Abu Sayyaf.

And what else do you do? You preside at the inauguration of a jumbo cigarette firm — was that Philip Morris — heedless of the health of our citizenry. And you meet, if not consort, at the Palace with Senator Panfilo Lacson, the very mention of whose name sends fear and reprobation throughout the land. What you direly need in these times is a beachhead out of your troubles because you are lost and confused, unable to understand the world you live in because your moral moorings leave much to be desired. Cigarettes. Ping Lacson. What next? Abu Sabala-in-waiting?

If you want to stay the course until 2004, you have to fortify the center of Philippine politics.

But the center is disintegrating, for we are as much hostage to what happens locally as to what happens internationally. America, Japan and the European Union are undergoing an economic slump, and our exports have nowhere to go. What is worse is that Singapore and Taiwan’s economies are cracking like parched earth during a drought. What does that mean? Tens of thousands of our overseas workers in these two countries are now being ejected, soon a lost and forlorn army coming home to roost in a purgatorial pit — their dreams of tomorrow shattered.

How do we exit? Mrs. President You tell me. So far I see no escape routes. Unless you defy the odds, take out your broadsword, plunge like Joan of Arc in to the mile, cut off heads and rearrange your priorities. Can you? A new breed of economists now talks about "collapsed societies" unable to traverse the road between colonialism and capitalism. Countries like Burma, Myanmar, Cambodia, Sri Lanka. Will this be our fate?

* * *

Ever since I can remember, from intermediate to high school to college and university, I was enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. (ROTC). There was some pride and satisfaction in being an ROTC cadet, a feeling you were not only carrying out a civic duty but preparing for the day you could defend the country in war. Yes, khaki-clad cadets roamed the campus during drill days, smart, our uniforms pressed clean, our shoes gleaming with spit and polish. We made sure of that.

We bore rifles as we marched in diverse formations. At one time, I was a bugler, at another a drummer. We learned to dismantle and assemble machineguns in a jiffy, standing up after each session to announce the job was done. Senior cadets and regular Philippine Army troopers and officers examined how well we performed, and when we did very well, we were praised in public. I was such a cadet at the UP campus when World War II came and we had to remain in campus for sometime.

Yes, we did feel fulfilled as ROTC cadets.

Now, violence and scandal have wracked the ROTC and thousands of male students are out not only to paralyze the ROTC but crush it altogether. Months ago, Mark Welson Chua, cadet officer of the UST, exposed anomalies committed by the Armed Forces contingent assigned to the university. For his exposé, Chua was killed, his body floating in the Pasig River last March, his hands and feet bound as was his face with packing tape. His death and Chua’s exposé led to the relief of UST commandant Army Maj. Demy Tejeres and his staff members. They had been mulcting ROTC students, extending favors in exchange for cash.

That I find totally revolting. I am a war veteran. I fought in the Battle of Bessang Pass as a guerrilla, brushed against death several times. I strongly condemn the corruption in the ROTC, perpetrated by professional army officers and soldiers who should be court-martialed, dishonorably discharged and thrown into the brig. The ROTC has lost its reason for being.