THE OFT-RECURRING, nagging, vexing question is: where do we go from here? How do we know that the brightest light in the tunnel is not that of an incoming, wayward train? Remember, the devil passes itself off as an angel of light.
It’s a cynical, internal agitation in our time, especially because of the time we are in, and the confusing mix of presidential candidates served clumsily on our plate. Our excitement is fodder for exploitation. Succumbing to the political atmospherics, the question has the foreboding of a bad prophecy.
It’s part of the tricky terrain we have been trekking on ,like a Sisyphean task , for a long time. Is democracy our curse or our blessing? What is the Filipino’s political birthright? Unbridled mockery by our leaders confounds our better judgment and best intentions. We long desperately for utopia while experiencing dismally dystopia.
Like in a bad dream , political conversation in this land has been famished severely. The pattern appears to insidiously follow the bad-to-worse route, after taking exuberantly off from the good design. Blame it on the marked absence of a precious word that could have made our political life richer, our democracy stronger, our society a model in uprightness for public officials, or politicians in the process of their progressive, not regressive, evolution.
Not surprisingly, though ironically, it took a politician to point out what we sorely lack or miss: nobility. It’s the nobility of public service, and therefore, the nobility of the public official. The concept that a public office is a public trust emanates from that honorable, pristine source. It’s been honored more in the breach, both in theory and practice, God knows for how long now.
Thankfully, there are two eggheads in the backwoods among thousands of local leaders in the land of 100 million people.
Introducing: Mayor Oscar Moreno of Cagayan de Oro City , one of two local chief executives who have endorsed wholeheartedly Vice President Leni Robredo to be the country’s next president on that old-fashioned basis. (The other one is Jerry Trenas of Iloilo City).To be noble is to be noteworthy. And it’s more than just being a good man, according to the Moreno gospel. He thinks Sen. Manny Pacquiao is a good man, but he doesn’t believe he should be president. Nobility is way above his many divisions or eight championship belts.
To be noble is to be honest. Honesty, so it has been written, is the absence of lying , of deception, of cheating, of stealing, of treachery, of guile. It’s not just the absence of one vice, but all of the vices, as if they were in an ideal fruit. It’s a sweeping broom , and one can easily agree with Moreno that against this backdrop, only one presidential candidate will be left standing in the field. Guess who have been exposed to be the prime exponents of these chronic vices `in our modern history?
As it is, if you follow Moreno’s logic, Filipinos need to raise the bar in choosing the nation’s leaders, most particularly its president.. The context is too powerful to miss his point. What seriously threatens the future is the convergence of leaders, past and present, whose best character falls short of Moreno’s standard. We have been used to viewing the glass half-full when it’s been half-empty. It’s time to change the perspective and demand more from those who wrongly see themselves in the mirror as meritorious — bedeviled, as the American writer John Steinbeck said, by the impostor syndrome.
The shortest distance between two points is the straight line.It’s not just a geometric axiom. It’s political,too. In fact, the coined acronym is also very short , cryptic and to the point: MADE. They’re not too polite about it. No ifs or buts. It can give you the creeps. MADE stands for Marcos, Arroyo, Duterte and Estrada. The convergence became an automatic coalition, like spontaneous combustion, of prominent politicians, moving heaven and earth, to elect Bongbong Marcos, the son of a former dictator, as the next president in the 2022 election.
Their reputation uninspiringly precedes them. The records speak for themselves. The dictator was thrown out in a people power uprising (or sitting down) eponymously named after a long, traffic-snarled highway. The dictator and his family are still fighting the courts over unexplained wealth that is considered a product of a big-time theft. (Joseph)Estrada was impeached and then jailed for alleged graft. (Gloria) Arroyo was detained in a veterans’ hospital for the same alleged crime. Sen. Richard Gordon believes with all his heart that Duterte should follow their footsteps on the same ground, and shamelessly no less.
The argument is simply devastating: why would anyone, then, blithely claim innocence or ignorance, even millennialism, over the dominant choice for Bongbong as the presidential bet to choose when the endorsers themselves are the bad guys from the OK Corral? “A generation of the unteachable,” said George Orwell “is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.”
Moreno is telling us that before competence, experience, even secret diplomas from Ivy League campuses here or abroad, nobility should come first. Maybe it’s time to dump the so-called “best and brightest” in our midst but opt for the one with the less glow. No play on word here. In hard times like the pandemic, people readily fall for the easy substitutions like pedigree, charity, experience, competence, promises, propaganda and excellent advertising. In the nitty gritty, the gritty beat the nitty.
Nobility should not be equated with royalty, even if some presidential aspirants claim political turfs as duchies of sorts. Royalties have also their own crooks. Read Shakespeare. “ Look like the flower, but be the serpent under it,” he wrote in Macbeth.
Robredo, like Esther in the Bible, shows up during a critical period when democracy is highly at risk and decency seems to be a lost virtue in government. Also, she has come at a time when women leaders show up better than men globally. “ Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this,” Mordecai, her cousin, prophetically reminded her.
Who knows, indeed, how optimism can be a game-changer.
