Cheers and tears

The season bades people to be merry and to wish each other the best. Everywhere is unmistakable glitter, with homes, malls, offices, schools and churches sporting Christmas trees, garish lights and flashy lanterns. Insistent jingles saturate the air and make peace on earth – at least in this particular part of the planet – an ironic proposition.

There is much superfluity in the season. Beneath its thin patina of glitter, mirth and hopefulness, a nation tries vainly to conceal its pain and growing desperation. For most Filipinos, neither the economy nor the polity has performed in such a way as to permit rational optimism. Beneath the nation’s dressed-up macroeconomic statistics lurks the pervasive spectre of mass poverty; in Pulse Asia surveys, a third of the nation regularly says having enough food to eat is their most urgent personal concern. Countervailing the economically stabilizing effects of incomes gained by Filipinos abroad – a reassuring statistic religiously factored into calculations of the gross national product (GNP) – is the highly destabilizing, long-term social cost of family separation and family breakdowns and the understandable failure of critical national socialization.

Political governance affords little comfort except to the illusionists who prefer comfortable illusions to disconcerting realities. Politics – an honorable craft that well-governed societies deem vital to their sustained well-being – is systematically degraded into politicking, a pernicious activity that those who are self-centered and irresponsibly manipulative practice to stay in power. Transactional or patronage politics and dynastic rule are signature creations of politicking politicians.

Those who politick make promises with a solemn, sacrificial face; their pledges are broken with just as solemn and perhaps an even more sacrificial face. In making or breaking promises, no trace of discomfort or disorientation is discernible on these politicians’ extremely plastic faces. Their rhetoric for national unity rings with impressive piety and uplifting patriotism. Unfortunately, their politically divisive acts reflect only self-serving pragmatism and dedicated self-promotion.

Filipinos cannot find much that is consoling in reviewing their first three years since the start of the new millennium. Neither can they be consoled much by alternative political choices that could take the nation through the millennium’s first decade. Assessing the comparative merits and demerits of those offering themselves to lead the nation in the coming elections, many Filipinos legitimately feel that they are – as has happened so many times before in their long history — limited to a poor choice of several evils: the greater, the lesser and – wonders of wonders! — the least evil. As a talented, recently retired professor of mathematics in the University of the Philippines succinctly put it, "In this elections, my choice – Candidate X – is the least objectionable."

Without even grieving over the tragedies of Ormoc, Antipolo, Payatas and their current replay in Hiniloan, Southern Leyte, there is much that can move intelligent and concerned Filipinos to tears when they courageously review their country’s governance and economic history.

These Filipinos will not wear a mask of seasonal merriment and be seduced into forgetting the nation’s cruel memories or those responsible for inflicting them on this country. Neither will they, like some victims of a past heinous administration now favoring a policy of general amnesty, confuse the nation’s life with their personal situation; even as they may have attained much comfort materially speaking, they will not allow their improved personal lives to blunt their senses and make them forget a past that continues to haunt the nation’s present. A cruel past that threatens to endure with much greater viciousness well into the nation’s future.

These are Filipinos who can decide that enough is indeed enough. For them, the elections of 2004 just may not be enough. A more critical political development could await this nation, something that Filipinos who now grieve enough may soon demand, initiate and, most resolutely, sustain.