Friday, July 25, 2008 Seares: Waiting for 2010 By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
IT won't be just a year. For Filipinos, it will be the year.
in 2010, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will end her term as president and her struggle against being removed from office.
Mike Velarde, her spiritual adviser, thinks the years of dangerous governing for Mrs. Arroyo are gone. No more bated breath over whether she'd still be in the Palace at day's end.
Her minus-38% rating, which theoretically tells how unpopular she is, would help fuel a process to unseat her: impeachment, coup, or street protest.
Yet, anti-Gloria forces seem to have abandoned that route to power. Mrs. Arroyo, using guile of a veteran tactician and power of a sitting president, has proven indestructible.
Against her foes' rabble-rousers, she has won to her side local political leaders, legislators, kingmakers, bishops, and generals.
She has been lucky. God and the saints, presumably moved by prayers counted by huge rosary beads, have smiled on her, or at least haven't made divinity work with her enemies at the gate.
There were social forces too that have produced a nation wary of violent transfer of power and recycled would-be successors.
Now, people just wait for 2010.
Waiting for Godot
Unlike waiting for Godot in the 1952 Samuel Beckett play, which is waiting "endlessly and in futility for something to happen" and nothing happens, here something will definitely come.
The President will end her term. She will step down as she has promised she will and as the Constitution says she must.
If she wouldn't, still something would happen. It might not be pretty. But the waiting wouldn't be for nothing.
