OR ARE we back in the tyrannical and fascist era of Marcos?
But some say there is no Presidential declaration of Martial law nationwide, except in Mindanao. The House and Senate are functioning as usual, and so with the judiciary and executive branches. The local government units (LGUs) are doing their regular rounds of governance. The media institutions are still free to say what they want. The business sector seems feeling upbeat despite some ebb and flow in the market behavior.
The organized citizenry are likewise holding protest actions anytime they want. The citizens at large seem feeling positive towards the programs of the administration.
True, everything looks like normal especially when one listens to the state media and state news or the obvious administration social media trolls. They all seem to imply that the Philippines looks like going through the golden age of its national life.
But those who go down to the households of the workers, contractuals and casuals, farmers, plantation farm workers, drivers, vendors, odd-jobbers, teachers, low-paid professionals, journalists with low income and high risk job, out of school youth and students, call center workers, and engage in real dialogues -- see and hear different stories, that everything is not normal.
It takes a dialectical or critical perception of seeing realities, pedagogical training of constant dialogue with various forces at work, and continuing interaction with realities -- to see and experience the ironies behind the normality of social reality.
It takes their kind of senses to see and ask why there is continuing troops build up not only in rural areas but urban centers as well, why the obvious sustained intelligence, psywar and combat operations by state security forces in provinces with high rate of armed insurgency and protest actions, why the massive round the clock check points everywhere, why the high public visibility of police teams and vehicles.
It takes a critical eye to differentiate propaganda and facts, fake news and truth, and to see the correlation of sustained red-tagging and demonizing and hunting and killings of the left and the administration critics.
It also takes the same to conclude that the so called whole of nation approach to end communist armed conflict is nothing but a recycled propaganda of hyping and generating reactionary populism to a distorted, perverted kind of peace, of killing the left and the critics and bring them to the peace of the graveyard.
Finally, and more importantly, it takes a sense of and for change to appreciate and nurture the dimensions of struggles and hope amid the efforts of the status quo to suppress facts and realities and turn everything to normal.
Everything is not normal. There is a state of war in the country.
And in every war condition, the inherent contradictions are bound to sharpen and explode in the right time and process, and transform itself to new conditions and new contradictions will emerge.