Challenged

Hope is a virtue. It nourishes the spirit. When it is lost, we lose the capacity to battle adversity and set visions. Without hope, there will be only despair.

When one recent survey showed 95 percent of Filipinos remained hopeful for the New Year, this was not the news. Hopefulness is the default condition.

The news was that 5% were not hopeful about the near future. That is a large number, considering the question. We should want to know, in more precise terms, why they had lost the natural quality of hopefulness.

If they had become merely cynical, then that number might just be written off. If they represent a quantity of the population in deep despair, then perhaps a public program ought to be organized to attend to that emergency condition.

And if they had lost hope because of something they know, then we should, for more than mere curiosity, try to uncover the insight that had caused the loss of hopefulness. That might help us better navigate the perilous waters ahead. One philosopher of note did popularize this aphorism: He who eats the fruit of knowledge will never enter Paradise.

That year we abandon today was, without doubt, harsh. We were visited by an inordinate volume of calamity aggravated by official incompetence. The last bout with flooding alone killed over 1,500 Filipinos. That toll will sharply rise after the thousand or so declared missing are eventually written down as dead.

We are told that the country remains within the cycle of a protracted La Nina weather pattern. In the wake of calamitous floods, the weather forecast comes with some amount of grim foreboding, considering that funds for disaster relief have been reduced to favor expansion of a cash dole out program that has the by-product of buying popularity.

It is not only disaster relief that has been debilitated by what seems to be an overwhelming appetite for playing politics. As this year drew to a close, we saw a political blitzkrieg culminating in the impeachment of the Chief Justice.

The New Year opens on a distinctly political note with the impending impeachment trial at the Senate. The administration seems to be in great hurry to get this thing done and over with. Palace strategists clearly miscalculated on the course this effort will run. They had hoped they could bamboozle the Chief Justice into resigning as had happened in the case of the impeachment exercise launched against the former Ombudsman.

The Palace strategists grossly underestimated Chief Justice Renato Corona.

He knows that if he runs away from this One Big Fight, the rest of the judiciary will likely wilt before a determined effort to reduce the independent branch of government into an unquestioning underling of an imperial presidency. There will be great temptation thereafter to politicize all the great questions submitted to the bench, decide them on the basis of intimidation and rabble-rousing, and eventually degrade our legal order into a meaningless and porous framework for managing the life of the Republic.

Over the holidays, I received more invitations for political meetings than for reunions. Even the reunions transformed into forums on the rule of law. The last time a season like this happened was in December 2000. We all know what happened weeks into the New Year.

Many professional associations and even religious sects are taking clearer positions in defense of the tripartite system of government we adopted to ensure democratic government. Over the next few weeks, we will see heightened public debate that will better articulate the issues and likely alter the public opinion profile dramatically.

It is unlikely the Aquino administration will get through this intensely politicized episode substantially unscathed. All the various groups critical of the way things are going under the present dispensation have found a unifying icon in the defiant leader of the judicial branch.

I will not dare forecast the run of things as soon the skirmishes over the impeachment of the Chief Justice commences. I will go only so far as to reproduce here the witty observation of a very concerned citizen I talked to the other day: When the senators ceremoniously donned their gowns before the Christmas break, they did appear like a choir ready to carol. What they will ask for in exchange for cheer is anybody’s guess.

No forecasting is needed to anticipate that an intensely politicized episode ahead will drain the administrative energies of a political order required to manage multifold challenges in the coming year. Whatever the outcome of this bizarre political game the administration chose to play, it is, in and of itself, already a calamity.

2012 will be another challenged year.

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The European debt crisis remains basically unresolved. The large cost of the failed effort to keep the southern European economies from defaulting has now produced disturbing symptoms of economic weakness in the core economies of that common market.

As Europeans grapple with their fiscal and financial woes, the entire global economy will be lackluster. The large emerging economies expected to substitute for the mature industrial economies as engines of growth are beginning to show strain. Investors everywhere are keeping an anxious eye out for the possibility of a financial meltdown in Europe.

2012 will likely be the year marking the peak of remittance inflows into our economy. Economists are now telling us that there is no more headroom left to grow the remittance flow on which our consumption-led economic expansion has depended on for decades.

A downturn in remittance flows will aggravate the sharp slowdown of our domestic economy the last few quarters. The signs are not good.

Notwithstanding, I wish all my readers all the cheer for the New Year.