IF THE Chinese Zodiac is to be believed, 2017 as the year of the Fire Rooster could bring both luck and misfortune for President Digong who was born in March 28, 1945, which also fall under the year of the Roosters.
There are no hard and fast rules in determining what the year holds for an individual who was born under this Chinese Zodiac like the President, but it would also be good to at least take heed of the signs and warnings.
People born on the year of the Wood Rooster, the zodiac indicated, are "Energetic, overconfident, tender, and unstable," characteristics that easily describe the President.
But it's not as if zodiac signs are determinant of probabilities in a presidency. It is still the sincerity and commitment of the President to his earlier pronouncements and promises to the people that would determine whether his administration would succeed or fail in the coming days.
Topping the list of issues where President Digong made assurances during the campaign period was on the Peace Process, where people was really banking on, believing in his previous capacities to talk with revolutionary forces.
Perhaps, it is quite early to speculate as to the turn of events of late, but one of the glaring realities that seem to cloud the talks is the seeming snail pace that political prisoners' release is taking.
Are they going to be freed or are they not?
There are many different conjectures going around now, certain things that some self-proclaimed gurus of national issues often thought they knew better.
That's why at the turn of another year, people tend to expect new things to happen, new beginnings, new perspectives and what have you... It has become so predictable that like teleseryes where the plot of the story is just being recycled all year round, and only the characters are changed from time to time, one can easily guess where the story is headed. It becomes boring.
But TV network persists to air such programs because, first, they wrongly thought the masa wants it and second, it is where advertisers poured their money on, banking on the idea of the trivial.
What adults tend to pass off as entertaining to kids, the oft repeated commercials that children below seven years old are glued on are actually what makes television thrive.
With it are the negativity and gore that news patrol passes off as "information," which never helped people understand issues but only add to the hopelessness and disillusionment of citizens in the state of affairs in our country.
And we ask, just like in a song: "where do we go from here?"
The so-called prisoners of conscience and their families are waiting for the fulfillment of the "promise" that might never come. This is when we come to realize why the President seems to have a change of heart?
It must be clear here, though, that POLITICAL PRISONERS are not CRIMINALS!!! They were incarcerated because the former administrations and their military ilk considered them "threats" to their drive against insurgency.
They do not seem to realize that addressing the root causes of poverty is the REAL solution to the problem, and not the personalities or individuals or ideologues that saw what the problem was/is in the first place.
Sad to say that President Digong seems to be falling on the same trap that his predecessors have fallen, believing that the only solution to the problem of insurgency is silencing the complaints, through the muzzle of the gun. And we thought we have finally found an ally of peace in President Digong!