The Military / The Church

There are two sounds you hear emerging these explosive days. The first is the sound of the bayonet crackling towards state power. The second is the sound of prayer groping for redemption and God’s providence. They are antithetical, the clash of opposites. The first is ready to draw and spill blood if the situation requires. The second seeks the balm of peace and national tranquility. And yet they are two peas in a pod. For they arise at a time of great crisis when the nation fears the morrow.

Each seeks to throw back and subdue what the state fears could be imminent – the rebel thunder of people in the streets.

Prayer, prayer, prayer.

The Roman Catholic church, by and large, fears a people’s uprising occasioned largely by perception of "massive cheating" in the recent elections. So the Catholic hierarchy would close ranks, as a towering castle closes its gates to stop the enemy in its tracks. And yet there are many within the Church – the activists including some powerful bishops – who are convinced the cheating was widespread. They fear that even if President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is proclaimed June 30, she will rule over a deeply, divided land. A great many believed she cheated prodigally.

For it is a fact that multitudes of voters, who did not like FPJ, voted for GMA because they feared, detested and disliked Fernando Poe Jr. (GMA) more. In that sense, she does not have a convincing mandate. And not having that mandate, GMA sits on an uneasy throne. Moreover, it is a country now bleeding profusely at the pores. Extreme poverty – one of the worst in Asia – just awaits a spark to burst and snarl like a vengeful dragon.

It is uncanny, and certainly unwise that many patriarchs of the Roman Church would now counsel their faithful to stay away from street demonstrations. Stay away, your eminences? Your reverences?

There was a lot of evil perpetrated during the elections. And if the Church would now stuff its ears, close its mouth, and cover its eyes, it is not the Church at all, harboring morality at its core. Was Emerson right after all when he said: "It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists?"

So the Church would now forget the roles it played at EDSA I and II? And seemingly rushes to the side of ultra-conservatism and, many say, that of GMA?

Isn’t this a knife thrust at the Constitution whose Preamble partly reads: "We the sovereign Filipino people, imploring the aid of the almighty God, in order to build a just and humane society and establish a government that shall embody our ideals and aspirations do ordain, and promulgate this constitution." The Church would now marginalize the "sovereign Filipino people" as it sprinkles incense at the feet of status quo? Whither the Church’s Preferential Option for the Poor?

This is not the Church I knew during the two EDSAs, the first in 1986, the second in 2001.

Jaime Cardinal Sin’s voice was powerful and Promethean, rolling across the country with accusatory thunder. Priests, nuns, the religious manned the barricades of EDSA in 1986 with their breviaries and rosaries, silencing the guns of approaching tanks, eventually bringing the government to its knees. There was power in prayer then because the street protesters were ready to give up their lives in immolation. Today’s offerings of prayer by the high and mighty cut no ice because they are petals from a poisoned tree.

Spare me. Such pompous prayers – I have heard a multitude of them – will not save the country. Only the power of the streets can. That is, if this power eventually leads to a catharsis, meaning the top crooks and criminals get it in the neck – I really mean in the neck – and the poor given access to mass and advanced education, our economy extricated from the swamps.

Look at the current congressional session. If that doesn’t convince you our political system is rotten, absolument pourri, zilch, an open can of wriggling worms, materia bulatenensis, nothing can.

I look at the faces of the presiding officers, Senate President Frank Drilon and Speaker Jose de Venecia. Neither convinces me at all the republic is safe in their hands. The lyrics of Chatanooga Choo-Choo are writ in their faces. Their political battlecries are no different from the mouthings of a crocodile herd. The others, of course, in that congressional session are no different. Except one who merits sumna cum laude honors and whom we deal with separately.

He is Rep. Digalen Dilangalen. No man, no political creature like him have I ever laid eyes on.

He is both clown and attack dog, a comic and parlor destroyer, who can make you laugh and make you cry, and wish you had never encountered anyone like him in your life. Mr. Dilangalen snarls most of the time, savoring each moment he shocks and terrifies the audience. He shouted "Shut up!" at the presiding officer twelve times, I think, something that never happened before. A lady by the name of Suzette Pido in the audience, fed up with his mouthings sent him a note to shut up, identified herself as taxpayer.

Hell hath no fury like Rep. Dilangalen told by a gallery spectator to shut up. He screamed imprecations, told the majority floor leader to shut up in no uncertain terms. I was beside myself with laughter and anger. This, I told myself, was Congress, these our politicians, everything a charade, an insult to our senses, proof final and positive that our political system was a huge and stupendous fraud.

* * *

Now to the military.

There is every reason for the ordinary Filipino to be scared. It is a crazy country arising from the semi-rubble of the elections. What the future portends we do not know. All we know is that the nation is in emotional turmoil. And this kind of turmoil can lead to turbulence. And this kind of turbulence may and can lead to anarchy and chaos. And this kind of turbulence can lead to violence and bloodshed.

Eventually the military will be sorely tempted to restore order and normalcy, as the political center melts down.

The military certainly knows in a country like ours, it cannot hold on to power, and taking over Malcañang could trigger the beginnings of civil war. Better then for the military to designate which civilian political force can ascend to Malacañang? In this case, who? Some say the military may be more inclined to choose FPJ than, for instance, Brother Eddie Villanueva’s Bangon Filipinas party. This is pure blarney. The military makes no such decision.

The military too is walking on egg shells. What it should and must do is start consulting with prominent leaders of civil society. And this includes the Church which provided the spiritual sinews of the two EDSAs. It ignores at its peril the legions of Brother Eddie Villanueva, the only party during the last elections which provided bursts of spiritual illumination. The military would also do well the touch base with Raul Roco and Ping Lacson.

We are assuming here that the present political system has reached or is about to reach the end of its historic string after failing for more than five decades to build some kind of rock upon which to anchor the stability and progress of the Filipino citizenry. The opposite has occurred. The nation has become bankrupt, pathetically banging a banjo all of whose strings have disappeared.

With an 84-million population still perilously increasing at 2.4 per cent a year, we have figuratively become the boat people of Asia, leaving our nation by the millions each year.

Our leaders are nuts, completely mashugga when they dream that tomorrow will bring a new dawn. Jose Rizal said that before he fell at the Luneta in 1898.Ninoy Aquino also said that before he collapsed lifeless in 1986 from a soldier’s treacherous bullet. A new dawn will come only when we pound the present system of the very rich and the very poor to smithereens and stop pretending we have a democracy with six lungs.

This is what our military must understand.

If it is to be the trigger to a new dawn, it must love the country first of all, and I mean its generals and colonels, its majors and captains. It must expunge ex-Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan as a model for the military youth. He is a disgrace. It must restructure the class curriculum at the Philippine Military Academy and teach love of country, nationalism, values formation, morality before it teaches anything else.

As it is, many in our military and police today – the officers, mostly – are perceived as corrupt, no longer the officers, gentlemen, and rock-ribbed warriors for peace they were during the old days when I was still a college student. The military must moult. They must shed their present culture, and get into the present with their cojones in the right location.

If they don’t, they too will become an object of mass derision.