Reflections on elections / Understanding the Filipino

I have often been asked these past days and weeks by well-meaning and highly-educated Filipinos if the overall situation in our country today is worse off or better than it was when President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial rule 32 years ago. Invariably, and without any hesitation, I would answer "We are much worse off today." Invariably the next question would be: If it is, why don’t we and why can’t we do something about it? Unflinching, I would reply: "We have become a terribly divided people, confused, even lost, and there is nobody to inspire us, to lead us, to explode the idea we Filipinos must change."

Indeed when we look back, we were not lacking in Filipino leaders with great courage, with high intellect, with indomitable vision.

Ninoy Aquino was one. Even as a young boy in Concepcion, Tarlac, his concept of the dominating trait of leadership was knowledge. He said, as only an irrepressible Ninoy could say, that while his facial features resembled that of Sergio Osmeña, his brains were those of Manuel Quezon. It was much later on, as a young politician in Tarlac, that he opened up his chest to bare his guts. He took on Ferdinand Marcos who preposterously branded Ninoy as a communist. And there the battle was joined.

Not all the riches, not all the power that the dictator offered the young Aquiino could dissuade him from his chosen path. His was a cry wrung from the early freedom fighters of America: "Give me liberty, or give me death!"And so Ninoy died from a soldier’s bullet with the blessings of Malacañang and the military. The nation grieved. But its hero was already dead. Till today, the military has the stain of Ninoy’s blood on its hands.

There were others.

There was Jose (Pepe) Diokno who like Ninoy would have made a great president but who like Ninoy disdained power and riches. There was Evelio Javier, governor of Antique, every inch of him a potential great leader, who fought greed, graft, entrenched power. The powers that be decided Evelio Javier had to go, and mercilessly drilled his body lifeless with a hail of bullets. There was too Cesar Climaco, the white-bearded one who once ruled Customs, who defied Ferdinand Marcos. He slumped dead from a motorcycle, if memory serves me right, as the Palace’s hired assassins finished him off in broad daylight. Climaco had a gift for satire, the bon mot, the naughty, bandoliered sally.

During those times, not even innocent jokes were permitted. Baldomero Olivera, a former press secretary, landed in the calaboose for saying the the shortest distance between two points was not a straight line, but Imelda Marcos. In case (and here the joke remained silent) the dictator should go.

But to the point.

The situation today is a dozen times worse off than it was 32 years ago when the nation woke up one day to discover that overnight the whole archipelago was strewn with martial barbed wire. Only one man imperiously held the reins of power. A corrupt military did his bidding and spread terror in the countryside . There was no compelling reason to declare martial law. There were only about 500 New People’s Army guerrillas at the time, almost all bunched in Central Luzon. The Americans were still here, manning the US’s two biggest overseas military bases abroad, Subic and Clark Field.

There were approximately only 40-45 million Filipinos, still a moderately-sized population, still equal to the food resources produced locally. Nobody talked about mass hunger, mass starvation. Filipinos were not yet migrating abroad by the tens of thousands.

There was no "revolutionary situation" then, a favorite Marxist expression to justify launching a nationwide revolution. Today, as conditions have rapidly worsened, as mass poverty eats up the landscape, as graft and corruption belches fire like a devouring dragon, as crime and violence combine into a deadly spittle that poisons almost every neighborhood, there is every reason for the citizenry to explode.

Then why doesn’t it explode?

We Filipinos are captive of many myths. Deep in our cultural psyche is the notion of heaven and hell, paradise and hellfire, of good and evil, of miraculous intervention. EDSA I swas such a miracle and to a certain extent EDSA II. In both cases, the Roman Catholic Church through Jaime Cardinal Sin intervened like a flash of divine lightning.

The cult of mariolatry, adoration of the Virgin Mary and her extraordinary powers, is a blinding lodestar of our ethos. The rich, the powerful are embedded in the fantastic fable that just one visit to the confessional will rid them of all their sins, their greed, their treachery to the nation. Then they will be in a state of sanctifying grace and proceed to heaven. That could possibly explain why the powers-that-be hardly care for the poor.

One overpowering myth is our elections.

After every electoral exercise, the nation sinks deeper into the quagmire. But elections are the spectcular splash Filipinos need. They are one gigantic fiesta where politician and celebrity (often just one person) entertain the yokelry, divert them from their daily drudgery, extravagantly promise them what will never happen – their lives will be better off. Alas, the Filipino loves illlusion more than reality. He or she is a sucker for celebrity. Just a day’s brush with celebrity transports his dreary life into ecstasy at least during the campaign.

Prof. Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations) has me as a devoted disciple. But he loses me when he states (The Third Wave) that elections "are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non." Iraq will not become a democratic nation simply because, with America’s imprimatur, elections will be held next year.

In the Philippines, we have the political freedoms of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. We can protest to the high heavens, scream, kick off our shoes if we have shoes, rally and protest in the streets, hurl purple invective at our government. Our problem is that as we latch on to this democrracy, we caricature it. More and more, what we have in our hands is an illusion of democracy, not its reality.

We do not have its economic freedoms, and that, I think, is where real democracy lies. We are not free to break our chains of poverty. We are not free to educate our people, now swollen to 84 million. We are not free to crush the symbols of our misery, the great yawning gap between rich and poor. We are not free at all to arrest, arraign and imprison the biggest crooks and criminals in our society, as the Americans were free to manacle and kick into jail the thieving top executives of Enron, Andersen and other elite corporations.

And so, what else have we reaped?

As the electoral campaign drags or tumbles on, we Filipinos, however belatedly, are beginning to realize that Brother Eddie Villanueva and Raul Roco make more sense than all the other presidential candidates. While all the others have long sold out, Raul and Brother Eddie now ring a bell. Their piolitical and social consciences remain clear. They have guarded their moral values, their integrity, their right to plant their flags atop the mount of Kilimanjaro where only the most sacred and precious of tigers reside. Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night, tell me what hand or eye has framed thy immortal symmetry?

But it’s too late.

And again, we shall revert to our role of being Filipinos. Our consciences bleed only for the fleeting moment. Which we do when we remember Rizal, Bonifacio, Aguinaldo, Mabini, Ninoy Aquino. The day’s long and arduous journey leads inevitably into night, into the worship of false gods and false saints, into the teats of the Golden Cow, into mañana, bahala na, que sera sera, wala kang paki sa hindi mo pami, the narcotic booze of life instead of the tidal energy of existence.

Don’t you notice?

Gone are the great crowds, the immense hordes of people that pounded our streets in great protest. The huge crowds we get today are the religious swarms of Brother Mike Velarde’s El Shaddai and, yes of course, the Jesus Is Lord multitudes of Brother Eddie Villlanueva. The latter, much more than El Shaddai, has succeeded as a result of the elections in securing a beachhead into the national conscience. Even if Brother Eddie comes a political cropper May 10, he has struck stirring spiritual gongs about how wicked a nation we have become.