Recent numbers bred hope. Recent visions bred conviction. High hopes of concluding The Filipino’s battle against himself, his circumstances, the system, and the ‘other’ people in the system are now a common song. Collective apprehension rules the spectators on who will fight justly to deserve victory. Historically, the spectators took bets on black and white. Not now. Yellow has resurrected from dormancy – and it commands the battleground.
If you had it your way, you could have picked the third color to join the fight. We may even share preference on your selection; however, others are also awarded a civil right to place their bet. That makes the first rule: we have over 80 million spectators of different minds and the bet is uneven. Second rule: concede that your decades of discontent and misery are a consequence of your previously betting on the wrong side. Third rule: stop whining and realize that to attain your ideal political status quo, you must at least be a reluctant supporter rather than a stupid detractor. Fourth rule: the battle is strategically designed to be an onion turned inside out. You must get to the core before you mend the subsequent layers. Fifth, the battle starts now.
The core of the fight is between The Filipino against himself. This should not be discounted in a political context as one man can further divide or unite a country. This determines whether one man is basically good or not. Great thinkers ask ‘why’ and arrive at assumptions alone. We can then opine that a man’s moral essence determines his way of governance. To make a specific assumption, the merits of a man’s central figure and the reality of his constituents can be weighed. The power of the will is a given ingredient. When subjective arbitration fails, man’s moral finality can be sealed by his central figure: a dead parent, a political contemporary turned family enemy, an overshadowing sister, an unknown friend, or a mentor. The result can be summed into a continuum of opposites on whether he chooses crime or goodwill, selfishness or charity, empathy or indifference, and corruption or integrity. This is the part where a man decides on whether to live a politically just life or a politically perfect life.
The Filipino’s fight against his circumstances is well integrated in our consciousness. When the forces within ourselves are at rest, we look at the central figure of our country. For years, man has fought this part in a unidirectional perspective: the central figure is perceived as a good omen instead of a confederate. When man’s circumstances are adversely affected, the blame falls on the political equilibrium and the central figure becomes a bad omen. In recent years, this was seen as a cycle. This resulted in these adverse circumstances to accumulate. In fact, after accumulating, they complemented each other. Most spoken of these are population and poverty, illiteracy and unemployment, recession and underemployment, war and political killings, health and mortality, moral and social depreciation, and political and religious conflicts. Numbers and longevity can tell us of these issues’ severity. Some men began to take initiative at curbing some of these but disappointingly, they only cared about the costs and later find that the money’s on the other side.
The fight between The Filipino against the system and the ‘others’ in the system has stretched to ridiculous saturation and milestone. You hope that it will not happen again but owing to man’s exceptional ability for re-enactment, Epifanio de los Santos is now known not as a man but a revolution, corruption became synonymous with government, and politics equated with blood instead of a peaceful resolution. Some minor issues might as well be major ones as red tape, bribery, fraud, and human rights violation. Now, there is charter change.
The goal of charter change may best benefit us yet on second thought, we can say that if only the ‘others’ adhered to and respected the prescriptions of the law, it may not have come as far as paving the way to power wielding while the small ones are losing their time and faith. With the third color joining the fight, optimism resonates all throughout that agriculture may mean feeding hungry mouths, proper education may mean decrease in unemployment, underemployment may at least alleviate poverty, and unity may mean peace in Mindanao.
There is much to be written and thought of in this new battle. Tons of ideas emanate from decades of unsatisfied minds and unspoken grievances. We can stay as spectators because spectators move democracy and democracy moved the gambit. The first step has been taken and how the fight goes rests on how we move the rest of the pieces. Whether we step on black or white or switch bets from one to the other, internalize what wealways wanted as a conclusion: a checkmate.
When they say that the gambit determines the outcome of a chess game, it means that the winner will stand to take it all.
This article was first published in the Baguio Midland Courier. Please follow this link to view the article.
Thank you to Free-Photos for the featured image.