Of those who are always right

In a society where so many things are going wrong, those who are ever right deserve closer examination. These are exceptional people or groups who somehow never err in whatever they do and consequently need never apologize nor make amends for what ordinary citizens are often guilty of. Not only are they infallible in assessing the most complex situations, they are also ever in control of the most difficult ones.

In the Philippines, such people are among the most politically influential, the most religiously eminent, the most militarily senior and the most journalistically acclaimed. Memory fails when one tries to recall the last time any politician of substance admitted to being wrong. Those in power have always somehow done every thing that needed doing and during their watch nothing is ever permitted to go wrong. Economic macrofundamentals are predictably sound, political stability assured and graft and corruption largely a figment of the pathetic opposition’s partisan imagination.

Opposition politicians cannot apologize for anything since they are unable to do much while out of the power loop. Furthermore, they also are doing all the right things that have to be done – fiscalizing those in power, demanding transparency in governance, encouraging the public to have them replace the powers that be in the national administration and preparing themselves to serve the public definitely better than the current dispensation.

Among influential politicians, apologies are not in order. Why apologize when one does not err?

Religious leaders in this country do not acknowledge making any blunder, whether spiritual, economic or political. They admittedly help initiate and maintain political as well as economic orders but they are never to be charged with responsibility for any specific administration, public official or private sector influential. They move in the best-lit as well as the darkest corridors of power but their professed role is providing spiritual guidance to those who are powerful, never themselves wielding political or economic power. When presidents with whom they critically collaborate go wrong, these religious leaders go critical and do what rightly must be done. They no longer labor with, instead they labor against, their former collaborator.

So, how can one expect those who steadfastly do what is right to err or apologize. No way.

The military leaders are almost similarly situated. Generals, whatever might have happened in their own cozy offices or in their men’s less than comfortable battlefields, have always excelled in their strategic perspectives and tactical actions. On top of every problematic situation, they have kept the Abu Sayyaf, the MILF, the MNLF and the CPP-NPA on the run from day one all the way to current times. Whether from the military or the police, generals do not err in national threat assessment and cannot apologize for any instance of incompetence, neglect or other mortal failings. Directly assisting the political powers that be, making themselves available to the powers that could be and ever susceptible to spiritual advisers, these military leaders – all invariably officers and gentlemen of stature – make no errors and cannot be expected to offer apologies.

There is yet another group of people with which this country has been blessed. Bannered journalists, that special breed of people who fearlessly report their news and ingeniously balance their views, are certainly most deserving of scrutiny. Keenly analytical, reliably current and encyclopedically competent, they daily – literally "journalistically" – poke into the physics, metaphysics, religion, politics and the commerce of every conceivable happening – as well as non-happening – in the Philippines. Every now and then, when their expansive spirit moves them, they look into developments beyond the country and equally authoritatively define the wherefores and the therefores of international events.

Like their other gifted compatriots, Filipino journalists frustrate a dedicated search for confessed errors or proffered apologies. There is incredible truthfulness as well as accuracy in their reporting of any event as well as non-event. The insightful analyses in their formidable columns and editorials intimidate the most serious scholars and a mesmerized public can only gape in awe even as it customarily applauds these infallible productions.

What would this country be without its patriotic politicians, its eminently religious leaders, its fungible generals and its all-knowing journalists? Tremble, you who dare think the unthinkable!