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Monday, July 11, 2005
Editorial: Tyranny of choices
WILL the country perish in a surfeit of altruism?
Worsening the political polarization tearing the country apart is the confusion of ordinary citizens. It seems that all parties contending for power are coating with a patina of altruism their respective proposals for ending the country’s dilemma.
Will it be resignation or impeachment?
Resign
President Arroyo has been asked to resign by the political opposition and leaders, most prominently by the Hyatt 10, seven key Cabinet members and three bureau chiefs who resigned because, as they claimed, Arroyo’s decisions are guided, not by the interests of the nation, but “her determination to survive as President.”
Strengthening the voices of Arroyo’s critics is former president Corazon Aquino. She has urged Arroyo to step down and yield to constitutional succession to prevent other forces from “(grabbing) power.”
This bloc rejects resolving the crisis through an impeachment trial because, as Aquino argued, this process is “long and inherently contentious… (generating) more divisions in society and (casting) more suspicions on the threatened institutions of our democracy.”
Due process
Opposing the call for resignation is the President herself and her allies. Arroyo continues to assert that she is “duly elected to uphold the Constitution.”
She contends that some parties’ “dangerous pattern” of answering every crisis by “(subverting) due process” weakens the democratic institutions of the nation.
The President says she will submit to the due process called for by the Constitution once her opponents elevate their grievance to Congress and begin the impeachment process.
Crisis
By a slim margin of fortune, it is not yet Martial Law, a military coup or street anarchy that has supplanted the vacuum of credibility, which has left out in the cold the President, Vice President Noli de Castro and other power contenders—from the opposition’s transition council to the revolutionary transitional government proposed by a broad alliance of civil society blocs.
Last Friday’s gathering in Makati of groups favoring the President’s resignation fizzled out after a matter of hours. The waves of relief sweeping the nation should cue in power blocs about the true sentiments of average Filipinos.
Filipinos want their leaders to rebuild the economy. They want corruption to be defeated, the military, reformed. To achieve this, the people want a peaceful and legal resolution of the present turmoil.
As a nation of laws, ordinary Filipinos reject extra-legal attempts and justifications to replace the duly constituted authority. Many Filipinos reject any force arrogating authority in pinpointing the President’s successor.
The failure of last Friday’s gathering shows ordinary citizens’ rejection of the use of street pressure, violence or other political means to undermine the Presidency and the Constitution, the legal basis of nationhood.
Zoon politikon
Democracy’s fate will no longer be determined in the People Power arenas of Makati and Edsa, but by the vigilance of citizens upholding their roles in this democracy.
Governance is not solely the business of political players. Aristotle once called the human species as zoon politikon, the political animal that can realize its inherent good only within society.
Long after economists and social scientists rejected the construct that man is Homo economicus—the species that maximizes its own advantage—today’s democracies hinge on the aspirations and acts of Homo sapiens, the sole race that is biologically and culturally programmed to practice true altruism: undertaking deeds that do not result in personal gain but the “public benefit.”
(July 11, 2005 issue)
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