Breaking point
Last week I woke up from a dream, and in a few minutes was saddened to realize that it was just wishful thinking. In my dream, I was observing a group of young people in their 20s and 30s, organizing a movement to get people in communities to wake up to the abuses by government officials, elected and appointed. And to become angry enough to begin marching in the streets and expressing their disgust in various ways.
We seem to have reached the point of our government being “run like hell by Filipinos,” as expressed by the late President Quezon as preferable to being a colony.
How did we get here? Our tolerance for thievery, greed, lying, and authoritarianism seems to have risen to such heights that it seems to have become indifference. Is there a way to mobilize, even little by little, what in Latin America they called “conscientization”?
Our Vice-President righteously refuses to account for her billions of disbursed “intelligence funds.” The President has signed a P6-trillion budget that provides more funding for infrastructure (more pork barrel) than for social services (health, education, disaster assistance, etc.) for our majority of citizens. The education sector, which under the Constitution should have the largest share of the National Budget, has been reduced in favor of public works. Wasn’t the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) supposed to fund infrastructure projects?
Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. succeeded in keeping power for 20 years with support from a corrupted military and controlled media. When he was first elected, economically we were second only to Japan among nations in our part of the world. Today, since no one of consequence has been jailed for corruption since then, our economy ranks just above Myanmar among nine ASEAN countries. Half of our families experience involuntary hunger at any time. And the malnutrition and poor support for the education sector have consistently led to the ranking of our children in international tests for ability in reading, mathematics and sciences as the least capable in the world! And yet our President has signed a reduction in the education budget!
Is there a breaking point? Does a heroic leader have to die before our consciences say “Tama na, sobra na?” (enough already, that is too much).
Jose Rizal had to die to rouse us into a revolution against the Spaniards. And Ninoy Aquino had to be killed upon returning from self-imposed exile to sensitize us to the abuses of Martial Law.
There is just so much abuse by our government that we have probably been desensitized to the shamelessness of our politicians and their appointed bureaucrats. Even the justice system, all the way to the Supreme Court, has lost its respectability. Convicted felons among our politicians, including the Marcos family, have had their hundreds of multimillion peso cases dismissed for reasons like “too much delay.”
Thank God there is a minority of so-called “left-leaning” nationalist and liberal democrats who still speak out on economic and political issues affecting our people. And thank you, former Senate President Franklin Drilon for trying to help clarify some issues on the national budget, which even I still cannot understand!
It took us several years, and some compromises among various sectors, from small groups to larger and larger public demonstrations, but we did succeed in getting rid of the dictator in 1986.
I think our group of less than 50 liberal democrats, once organized, began marching in the “confetti revolutions” on Ayala Avenue every Friday. We faced fire trucks and policemen, and some were arrested, and one was shot in the back; but the movement grew gradually. Our professionals and business executive marchers were protected on the side by left-leaning activists in soiled T-shirts and rubber slippers. Courageous journalists like Joe Burgos moved their typewriters and copying machines from hideout to hideout whence they distributed their papers.
There were no cellphones yet at the time, but groups managed to form rallies here and there.
The snap elections and their dubious vote counting systems caused Comelec employees to run to the Baclaran Church to expose and protest the cheating they were being made to employ. For whatever their motives, the so-called Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) boys, led by then Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile, ended up on EDSA after being betrayed to Malacañang by one of their own. Jaime Cardinal Sin called on the people to come to their rescue, and Butch Aquino and his barkada in ATOM (the August Twenty-One Movement) began to march from Cubao towards the camps on EDSA, and throngs followed to what became the EDSA Revolution.
This bloodless revolution began with little groups of various persuasions, getting together to form and express their objections to the status quo. God provides unexpected triggers that mobilize national revolutions.
What will it take to bring about another bloodless revolution in our country?
The majority of the people are too poor, too hungry, and too ignorant to take to the streets against government abuses. The EDSA Revolution was mobilized by the middle class. Social media has become super-powerful. And it is the young who are competent in it. These young people never experienced Martial Law.
Can we learn from these developments? What, how, and when will we reach our breaking point?
Teresa S. Abesamis is a former professor at the Asian Institute of Management and fellow of the Development Academy of the Philippines.