It's All Political

I forwarded this essay to PDI during my DEVC 11 days (because of the .25 challenge), hoping that it'd get published in YoungBlood. Well, it didn't. Anyhow, it's still fun reading old posts, especially when they're the ones you don't usually write about. :)

Of Hungry People and Tarpaulins

I was going over through several piles of last semester’s graded papers and handouts that I stored inside a box when my eyes caught the words of Victor Hugo in his book Les Miserables as quoted in one of my lecture notes:

“Hunger blinds. Hunger kills. A hungry man is a dangerous person.”

Upon reading the words, I thought of the current President and all the other Presidents in the past, as well as the so-called ‘elected rulers’ of this poverty-stricken country. A pseudo-slideshow of editorial cartoons played inside my mind: EDSA I, Estrada and his Jose Velarde accounts, EDSA II, PGMA calling Garci, Trillanes and his coup attempt, ZTE deal with Abalos and Lozada, and all the other political scandals that have been persistently overplayed in their game called dirty politics. The idea was instantaneous; it was automatic.

Then, I also thought of those hungry people; those who are so poor that, if they get lucky, they could eat a pinch of rice once a day; those who are willing to kill for food; those whose lives are overtaken by scarring desperation. In my head there are also pictures of students, of common people, screaming and protesting with their “OUST the President” tarpaulins.

These are the faces of hungry people— people hungry for money and power; people hungry for food and stability; people hungry for reform. And it appears to me that the first group causes the unfortunate ones to suffer and starve for what they really deserve.

Often times I ask myself: If I were to rule this country, if I can have the access to all of our resources, if I have the power and authority to control and manipulate other people, would I be as hungry as them [the politicians], too?

I remember my Political Science 1 Professor; he said he also asked the same question. He is well-versed in politics, and he perfectly knows how it works. He might as well become a good politician. But even he doubts himself. I can tell that, in a way, he fears giving in to the temptation. He fears losing his dispositions and instead be overwhelmed by the pressure of our political system. He fears sinking down to the level of those who once swore “to serve the people” and are now misappropriating the public’s money for their own selfish gains. He told us the story of a priest elected in a local position in one of the provinces in the South, who stepped down after several months because he couldn’t take the corruption in the local government. Does this mean that even good people with the guts and enormous level of moral strength can never survive in the world of dirty politics? Where does this leave us?

It is very much obvious that the major features of our political system are the rampant corruption and pervasive cronyism. Filipinos blame the persisting poverty and failures in governance on our corrupt leaders. Philippine elections have become no more than a “noontime show” that entertains the masses with singing politicians, and the whole political hullabaloos being created is always about who can afford the most famous artists in show business during campaigns and who can have the better and more effective political machines. Once the votes are cast, and once they are already in position, poor people can say goodbye to the promises made by elected officials.

But of all the obvious features, the fact that our state is being ruled by the elite factions coming from the same families is the scariest one. It is all in the papers and news; politics is always about people having the same last names. Government positions are being passed on like a genetic disease, and even the greed and corrupt activities happened to be both contagious.
Considering the scandals that have been popularized these past few weeks— with the anomalies in the ZTE deal, with people rallying in the streets, and PGMA trying to regain her severely bruised stand— I can’t help but think of all the times we massed up in EDSA and demand for a Philippine President to resign.

Twenty-two years had passed since Filipino people united at EDSA and people coming from different social classes and age bracket screamed for justice and freedom from the Marcos regime. EDSA 1 showed how we revolted against the opportunistic and self-serving government under the influence of the Marcos family and their cronies which eventually strengthened the spirit of democracy in our country. I wasn’t even born when it happened, but I know that we were a proud country then. People said it to be glorious. We were overwhelmed by the ostensible “people power” and we were proud for acting as one nation.

We all thought it was the beginning of a new state, that the revolution successfully achieved its goal of having this country the chance of being reborn. We all thought what happened in EDSA was already our call for “change”. But when the same thing happened almost two decades after the first revolution (and now that we’re hearing EDSA buzzes again), the meaning of EDSA 1 has seemingly transformed into a habit. EDSA Dos to me isn’t as meaningful as the first one. It seemed to me as a mere escape from a hopeless system and a proof of how weak our state is. People may have come together and fought for the same thing, but I strongly believe that EDSA Dos wouldn’t have happened if only we had a fair, immediate, and just system that could have proven the deceitful and corrupt ways of the former President Estrada. It proved how unstable our government is, that what the government cannot fix in the inside, they take it outside—right there on the streets of EDSA. We only showed to the whole world that the democracy in our country never bestowed the sovereignty among its “people” and that we only act as a “seemingly powerful nation” in times of crisis, in times of irreversible situations.

Maybe it is true that EDSA revolutions have already become a bad habit of the Filipino people. That every time we see the dirty tactics and the hunger for power of those who are in position, we tend to remember the first time we did it. We tend to repeat it, hoping that it would also mean the same thing— that it would give the people of this country what they truly deserve. Perhaps we must learn by heart the true meaning of EDSA 1. It should give us the lesson of standing for what is right and just, and the lesson of maintaining that stand; and that all of us should act as “one” because today, as we all see it, we are just making the same mistakes and we are all trying to solve it in a way that was proven to be not as “powerful” as we thought it should be. Maybe of all the things PGMA said during her entire term, she was right about one thing: “there should be no more EDSAs.”