Ticking of the bomb / Kudos to Bayani Fernando

The ouster of Joseph E. Estrada never really dispelled the dark clouds. It never really gave us the respite to start reforming our society. It never dropped any rainbow for us to dance with any kind of jubilation on our public plazas. The Abu Sayyaf that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo assured us had been finally vanquished and crushed has reappeared in Jolo. Just to make sure we noticed they were back with a vengeance, they appended their grisly signature on their latest kidnap. They beheaded two of their six hostages and crammed these in containers displayed at the public market. This is medieval brutality, as only the Abu Sayyaf is capable of.

In a fit of childish pique, Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, hotly denied they were Abus. He said they were drug addicts roistering in the thickets of Patikul before they set out to kidnap the six, all presumed Witnesses of Jehovah.

Drug addicts, hunh? Then how come the elite of our Armed Forces have been mobilized to go after them, particularly the US-trained Light Reaction Company (LRC), supposedly the battle-worthiest of them all. And if this will not suffice, I would imagine America’s special troops will be called back — assuming they will agree — not really to fight on the ground because they dare not engage in actual combat but supply the state-of-the-art spy and satellite equipment to track the Abu Sayyaf’s every move. This I will say. You cannot really, finally and conclusively destroy the Abu Sayyaf.

So long as kidnap-for-ransom pays, so long as their mass support base remains the massive Muslim population of Jolo, so long as the Muslim rebellion in Mindanao remains unresolved, so long as Islam remains a religious empire looking fraternally upon their Muslim faithful in the South, and yes, so long as poverty grips our nation like a rabbit trapped in the coils of a hissing cobra, we shall never get out of this first decade of the 21st century with any kind of respite and release.

We the middle class residing in the urban areas feel this only too well.

We have a grim foreboding our world is narrowing. We feel that sooner or later the shadows from the South will hold us hostage in renewed Muslim rebellion. We feel that inevitably the shadows in Luzon and perhaps the Visayas will get to us — then boom! The shadows in Luzon are those of AFP troops and CPP-NPA guerrillas now circling each other as prizefighters warily move before visiting fistic mayhem on each other. If finally they get to fight, then I think all bets are off. There will be no presidential elections in 2004. The government will be fighting on two wide fronts. In such a situation, the military will have the upperhand, will be calling almost all the shots. And GMA will be reduced to a figurehead. Or ousted.

All this reminds me of a book I just read. This is Warrior Politics by Robert D. Kaplan with rave reviews by Henry Kissinger, William J. Perry, William S. Cohan, Newt Gingrich and other eminentos of post-Cold War international politics.

Kaplan describes the phenomenon of "populist rage fueled by social and economic tensions, aggravated often by population growth and resource scarcity in an increasingly urbanized planet." Yes, the Philippines in microcosm, dirt poor, with a present population of 80 million, probably 100 million in the year 2010." The world’s unequal distribution of wealth pushes "two dynamic classes" to the fore under globalization. These two are the "entrepreneurial nouveaux riches and, more ominously, the new subproletariat, the billions of working poor, recently arrived from the countryside, inhabiting the expanding squatters’ settlements that surround the big cities" all over the world. Yessir, that’s us.

I have been writing in this vein for many months now. And more than anybody else, I think, I have been hearing the ticking of a social time-bomb now in the cupped hands of Mars, the grim-faced god of war, and set to explode in the near future.

What worries me most is the Powell Doctrine. How could he? That was insane. The jovial US Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom I had earlier type-cast as a dove, recently tagged the CPP-NPA (Communist Party of the Philippines, New People’s Army) as a "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO). That completely altered the rules of the Philippines political game. An internal affair had now become the terrorist preserve of the US. That gave America the "preemptive power" to rip out the intestines of the NPA guerrillas, Joma Sison and all the communist satraps now riding the snorting horse of "communist revolution."

Because by God, they lord it over us in this country, lord it over GMA. And don’t anybody talk to me about democracy, about the Philippines’ sovereignty and "territorial integrity." Because, Sonny, there ain’t none when the American troops are back with all their state-of-the-art weaponry to kill, kill, kill. And GMA and our military-police generals "welcome" the Powell Doctrine. This leads me to suspect they might have put this into the US secretary of state’s head.

And with Congress out to legislate an anti-terrorism bill, you can pull out all the stops, gents and mesdames. This country of ours is on the road to the kind of multi-scale violence that should have occurred in mid-20th century, then blinked out to enable us to progress like so many of our Asian neighbors did. There is something terribly wrong with us Filipinos. We are always left behind, always left holding the bag, always left high and dry. And there is something even more terribly wrong with our leadership. We’re headed for war when we should be headed for peace.

President GMA now claims "I have a moral compass and I know where I am going."

Honestly? That moral compass was missing when she gave the dirty boot to Vice President Teofisto Guingona and former Education Secretary Raul Roco. That moral compass played hookey when she and her husband Mike Arroyo welcomed Ronnie Puno and Jimmy Policarpio into Malacañang’s igloo. That moral compass took a big dive when she welcomed the Powell Doctrine and virtually reopened the nation to the open-ended tramp of America’s military boot. That moral compass snored like Rip Van Winkle when she bragged the Abu Sayyaf had been crushed like a cockroach.

And nevermore, like the Raven, would the Abus rap on the nation’s door. Hoo-hah.

* * *

Nope, I cannot agree with Fr. Robert Reyes and the hundreds of sidewalks vendors out to pitch Bayani Fernando to the cleaners. Nor probably the thousands of the ringside poor who feel the MMDA (Metro Manila Development Authority) big boss has gone berserk and has declared class war on the oppressed and impoverished. I contend Mr. Fernando is doing a brave and thankless job — ridding the sidewalks of Metro Manila of vendors. Ben Abalos, his predecessor and now Comelec chairman, was an out-and-out trapo and served himself more than he served his constituency in Metro Manila. Look. No sooner had Abalos gotten into the Comelec than he purchased brand-new cars for Commission members, particularly the hated and reviled one, Luz Tancangco. This guy has the habits, the taste and the appetite of an Arab oil sheikh. Again – sorry Ma’m – another blunder of GMA.

But back to Bayani Fernando. He is a gust of fresh and wholesome air. He doesn’t scare at all even when photographed wrestling with the descamisados and snatching their sidewalk fare, and strewing them on the ground. He tells them to scoot and sell the public market where there are stalls. But they refuse and scamper back to their sidewalk niches when the coast is clear.

It is a fact that these sidewalk vendors clutter main streets and side alleys, obstruct traffic and virtually paralyze the normal passage of pedestrians and vehicles. This is of course prohibited by municipal ordinance, but who really cares? City and municipal mayors and councilors, the police just look the other way and the result is the choking of our cities and pandemonium.

The prevailing logic or rationale, I suppose, is that the sidewalk vendors are poor, close to being the scum or dregs of the earth. And we must, as creatures of the Good Lord, pity them. I don’t buy that. There has to be some order in Metro Manila and other cities or we lapse into the law of the jungle. That’s precisely what our neighbors in East and Southeast Asia say about Filipinos. We have no discipline. Ours is the exuberance of an Arab bazaar where everything goes, where voices gabble all at the same time, where joshing and elbowing are the rule, where petty fights often occur.

Bayani Fernando deserves all the support and encouragement in the world.

He cannot afford to fail. If he fails, we all fail. If anything so elementary as bumping off sidewalk vendors cannot be accomplished, and getting rid of them is allowed by law, then we fail dismally as a people. If it everything doesn’t work, then by all means, let’s allow Mr. Fernando to pour kerosene on the wares of sidewalk vendors. That will teach them.