Creeps

The same guys who threatened us with a "creeping impeachment" are now warning us of a "creeping martial law."

They tried to oust a government. Now they are fretting over the possibility that the government that survived the ouster moves might actually fight back, employing the weapons of the law.

All this talk of "creeping martial law" is plain nonsense.

It is as fabricated an issue as that thought up by the bad boy who cried "wolf!" It is a contrived alarm that, expectedly, did not fire up the imagination of the masses. The more the opposition personalities push this contrived issue, the more tenuously they stretch their own credibility.

Much of this contrived issue is sheer media play. One media outlet inflates the importance of some stray event; the other outlet rolls the story to the hilt.

Take that report about contingency planning exercises that include scenarios where government might have to take control of some strategic enterprises. Those are worst case scenarios – such as the possibility that we might experience oil supply shortages that make rationing necessary.

There is nothing unusual about that. All governments have agencies whose job it is to work up worst case scenarios and plan out contingency responses.

In the US, the Federal Emergency Management Administration failed to fully imagine the consequences of a Category 5 hurricane and design an appropriate response. We saw what happened. Looting and rapes broke out in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina put the city under water.

That resulted in the horrifying failure of the most powerful government on earth. If they did their homework ahead, the calamity might have been better managed. But if they did their homework ahead, the scenario might have been ridiculed.

Here, when government agencies do their homework, idle politicians charge the administration with "creeping martial law."

That happened when somebody leaked contingency planning exercises that drew up scenarios about putting strategic enterprises under government control. The opposition tried to jack up that leak into a minor hysteria about impending martial rule. The media ran he said/ she said stories, poking hypothetical questions at businessmen and converting the responses into rejections of martial rule.

The combative but highly skewed Mayor of Makati, riding the crest of a misplaced hysteria, announced that martial rule would be declared "in 48 hours." That was over a hundred hours ago.

What destructive idleness leads us to do these things? What sort of destructive politics allows us to make a preoccupation of malicious speculation?

We implant sharp stakes where there are none and proceed to impale ourselves upon them.

Some administration personalities have not been very helpful in helping stem the tide of destructive politics and the consequent outcome of national self-impalement. They fuel the speculation and use strange words whose very opaqueness adds to the confusion.

The Secretary of Justice should have dismissed the leaks about contingency plans involving take-over of oil firms as simply that: contingency plans. Given the wild behavior of global oil prices, we are, after all, never sure we can afford to buy all the oil we need and must be prepared to ration the scarce commodity to serve the best national interest.

All governments design contingency plans, no matter how remote the calamitous possibilities and how unlikely the required responses might be. That is the job of those tasked with looking after public welfare and national security. If those contingency plans were not drawn up, the authorities would be remiss.

And what’s this thing about "calibrated preemptive response"?

To begin with, the grammar is bad. Preemption is done before something happens. Response is what one does after the fact.

It is therefore hard to imagine the phrase "preemptive response."

We didn’t need that unfortunate phrase. It has only served to fuel even more irresponsible speculation. Now, the militants in Congress want a full-scale congressional hearing on what that funny phrase means.

All that needed to be said was that government would enforce the existing ordinances. Those ordinances are, after all, there in order to protect the wider public interest.

Preventing traffic jams caused by wildcat political rallies is, after all, the normal duty of governing authorities. They cannot, by reasonable stretch of the imagination, be interpreted as prior restraint on the freedom of speech.

By analogy, our labor laws penalize wildcat strikes. That does not mean we have no labor protection. Some old law penalizes "vagrancy"; which does not imply restriction on the citizens’ right of movement.

We don’t need to fancy up things by calling them strange names such as "calibrated preemptive response." We simply say that existing laws requiring street demonstrations to have permits so that the authorities may prepare for them and so that reasonable regulation can secure the welfare of all will be dutifully enforced. Enough of the elasticity we have allowed in the past where ordinances are regularly flouted by those who chronically claim to be the "people." Enough of bending backwards, sacrificing the larger public good, in order to accommodate the unreasonableness of political rascals.

Let’s all get back to treating things in their proper proportion.

These are, alas, unexciting times. The authorities are not inspiring and those who oppose them are not credible. Things are not perfect but we have no alternatives on hand.

Prepare to plod along, without much tumult. Prepare for workaday events, small increments of progress and large problems tenaciously clinging to whatever vision of the future we might have.

Those who overly dramatize things disable our collective sense of proportion.