This farce has gone on for too long. We hang our heads in shame. We’ve become – owing to our verbosity, nitpicking, and propensity to objection and debate – both the laughing stock and object of pity of this planet. The only thing which saves us from arousing gales of laughter and derision on every side is that most other countries have serious problems of their own – but none of them involving a silly debate over the simple act of counting official "certificates of canvass" (COCs).
This tempest in a teapot has been magnified into a crisis over the survival of our democracy. Survival? It’s already dead. What we’ve got is a society drowning in demagoguery. If you ask me, it was long overdue that the opposition "walked out". Anyway, the KNP, for all its fulminating and fist-shaking, still has to present evidence of "widespread" fraud and cheating. Let’s finish the canvass then, and have done with it.
The protests, afterwards, can be taken to our courts, or – as some fear in this unsettling situation – to the streets. Or to arms? Aux armes, citoyens! the French cried out in their revolutionary Le Marseillaise, now still sung by them as the fiercest national anthem in the world. Will our own citizens take to arms to bring Da King, the Opposition’s Fernando Poe Jr., to power, if – as it seems to be turning – the canvass turns against him? Doesn’t look like it, but who knows? That’s what makes the future look unstable and unpromising. An scares off cash and investors.
The sore losers, or those who claim they were cheated, have holed the Ship of State. Even if they’re, in a stunning reversal of fortune, awarded the "captainship" of the ship, they may have doomed it to sink already.
Is nobody after the common weal or the nation’s good? Those who thunder that they want to save the Republic are close to tearing down its pillars, and bringing the roof down on everybody.
It would all have been simple enough, even if the Opposition KNP – who’ve tired out everybody by its delaying tactics and filibusters – had "walked out". The KNP’s lawyers had already been running out of issues to raise. Sanamagan – would you believe? – GMA’s own eager-beavers, the stupid officers and officials o the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), at the very last minute, supplied those lawyers with a casus belli, a credible excuse to angrily walk out en masse.
Heaven protect La Gloria from her defenders: They’ve put a crimp in her winning streak – and made her look bad!
Why on earth did the PNP Criminal Investigation and Detection Group and the NBI file charges of serious illegal detention and grave coercion against, Susmariosep, former Justice and ex-Comelec Chairperson Harriet Demetriou and former Immigration Commission Rufus Rodriguez? As the old adage goes, and it’s still valid today: Let sleeping dogs lie.
Can you believe those two prominent lawyers "kidnapped" a Commission on Elections official, Hadja Rashma Hali, and her daughter for heavens to Betsy ten whole days in order to force them to testify on a case of dagdag bawas in the municipality of Tipo Tipo in Basilan? How petty – and how useless.
Justice Demetriou, herself a former tough judge and former head of the Comelec, was right to call the charges "ridiculous and barefaced harassment." As for Rodriguez, aside from his sterling record as chief of Immigration, he was the man who honorably withdrew his own nomination as Ambassador to Germany (he had been named by President GMA, herself) when it met stiff opposition in the Commission on Appointments, particularly from a hardlining and he-shall-not-pass Senator Ralph Recto. If Rodriguez had the delicadeza to retract his own nomination to a respected diplomatic position, why in hell should he undertake, detain and coerce a Comelec functionary in Basilan for some minuscule purpose?
Common sense should have told the police and NBI, at this crucial juncture, to leave that pipichugin "hot potato" alone.
KNP lawyer and spokesman Sixto Brillantes, Jr. really had a field day denouncing Malacañang for instigating this "intimidation and harassment" to justify the walkout of the Opposition’s lawyers.
Those behind this fiasco may have been trying to curry favor with GMA, and possibly get a promotion, who knows? Instead, they did La Presidenta a grave disfavor.
Without these fare guides stuck on the windshields of their vehicles, the drivers face apprehension and fines.
As a result of this imposition, thousands of drivers and operators have been forced to queue up in the heat of the sun, from 5 o’clock in the morning to late in the afternoon, to secure those required fare guides. Last week, one of the drivers who lined up under the blazing sun simply collapsed – and died.
FPJ, if you’ll recall, once filmed a box-office hit of a movie in which he played the role of a jeepney driver. Furious at the LTFRB "order", will thousands of disgruntled jeepney drivers, rally to him – joining the KNP Opposition protest? The GMA government – which has been for the past three years pursuing arduous and sometimes ruinous "populist" policies, in a desire to be accepted as "pro-poor", in response to the challenge of Erap para sa Mahirap – has now been torpedoed by the LTFRB’s rashly-imposed directive.
Sure, that agency may earnestly be trying to raise millions of pesos in revenues in order to help offset the overwhelming budget deficit – and thus please GMA. Alas, nobody thought out the consequences of forcing jeepney drivers to line up in the open for hours, under terrible weather conditions – just to cough up P520 apiece.
In July, 1982, in MANILA Magazine, I had written: "Every foreign correspondent or armchair editor, every scribbler of a letter to the newspapers, has become an "expert", reminding me of our government technocrats who seem to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Thanks to our "experts" and "technocrats" the most visible achievements of the (Marcos) New Society and the New Republic have been longer and more frequent electricity brownouts, rising Meralco bills, telephone without dial tones, escalating inflation, shrinking credit, traffic-clogged roads and expressways, devastating floods and the denudation of our forests. Five tons of technocrats stacked one on top of the other are worth far less than one ounce of cure. What alarms me is that our technocrats and sundry officials keep on jetting abroad at the drop of a memorandum – to borrow money. As one coffee shop wag quipped not long ago: ‘We have become a government of loans and not of men’.
"A couple of weeks ago, agonized newspaper headlines in our newspapers declared that Filipino nurses and workers were dying under bomb and shell and rocket fire as the Israeli forces tightened their ring of steel around the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and units of the Syrian Army in embattled Beirut. It is always a tragedy when our own people die in foreign lands. And in war, civilian casualties are a painful but inevitable part of the blood tax of combat . . . The real tragedy, however, is that so many Filipinos must leave home to seek a livelihood in other countries . . . They send their money home in dollars or pounds or dinars to send their children to school or support families that otherwise would be doomed to penury. Thus, whenever war erupts anywhere on this volatile planet, Filipino civilians are bound to be involved. We have become, in a sense, the Wandering Jews of the 20th century."
These words were published 22 years ago. Just change a few place names, and you get the Year 2004. And the Israelites, by the way, are still fighting the Palestinians.
As for our non-stop borrowing, our foreign debt now amounts to a monstrous $61 billion. And would you believe? The government is now attempting to borrow more money abroad, just to finance the "interest" payments on our foreign obligations.
From bad to worse – to worst. As I said some weeks ago, "I pity the successor of GMA". It looks like GMA will be the one to take over the bankruptcy woes of the (her) previous Administration.