THIS is a sort of homecoming for me.
I have, in a manner, come full circle to where I started some two decades back, when I wrote this column for the feisty community daily TODAY (I was, too, a reporter with the national daily TODAY, which I still maintain was the best darned Philippine newspaper of its time), which eventually signed up with the SunStar network.
I guess it couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous – better or worse is up for the toss – time, when the nation itself appears to have come full circle.
Back then, it was just a few years after we’d kicked out a tyrant and ended 14 years of hellish dictatorship and, after the first heady days of freedom, were finding out how tenuous it was to hold on to and build on our regained democratic space amid coup attempts and the return of the old oligarchy and their venality.
I won’t – as I didn’t then – mince words.
Today, we are at a crossroads and the choices we make in the foreseeable future will determine our future as a nation and people.
Let’s face it. Our nation is in turmoil.
Even as rivers of blood continue to pour from the thousands sacrificed on the altar of a misbegotten war on drug and we are deluged by a massive flood of lies, half-truths and invective, our democratic institutions have been emasculated, the delicate system of checks and balances dismantled, and the Constitution has been set up for mutilation as the country is pushed to the brink of an auto de golpe, a power grab by government to perpetuate itself.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it, Rodrigo Duterte, who has never hidden his admiration for Marcos and all things Marcosian, seems hellbent on besting his idol.
But – and this is the crux of the matter – only if we, the sovereign Filipino people, allow him to do so.
Of course, I expect vehement disagreement with the premise I lay down. Not that I mind. In fact, healthy debate is always welcome as the free flow and exchange of ideas is always healthy for democracy.
And even the often strident voices of the true believers is really not so bad once you acknowledge that their sentiments spring from a righteous anger at a system that has always exploited them, though they may not realize that this government isn’t any better and, in fact, is much worse in so many ways.
It is, however, a different matter when it comes to the enablers, they who know better but have opted to sell their souls and prop up this deviltry and even helped write its brutal script.
They include, of course, our “honorable” political leaders who are either too spineless to stand up for their constituents or, bless their opportunistic souls, consistently choose expediency over principle, not that they had very much to start with. Yes, it’s YOU I’m talking about and for whom I – as all of us who value what is good should – reserve my deepest contempt.
It is vermin like them who bring to mind what Einstein said: “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”
Dear reader, here is the choice: Do we allow the circle to close and thrust us back into the darkness of a tyranny many times worse than the one we rejected before? Or do we finally say “enough” and break the cycle?
I have chosen, a choice I hope doesn’t remain just one man’s opinion.