A political mentor and good friend, Ka Frisco San Juan, until a few years ago the president of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, who gallantly fought as a guerilla during the Japanese invasion, later serving in government as a congressman of his beloved Rizal, and appointed to government positions under several presidents, once observed something that will always be etched in my mind.
“What we need in this country is a bloody revolution. We are too soft as a people,” he told me in one of our conversations. I must admit that I was a bit shocked, but coming from one who fought aggression and was ready to sacrifice his life for the Motherland, that was understandable.
Ka Frisco must be in his nineties by now, and I haven’t seen him for quite a while. Seeing what is happening these days in what our president calls the country’s “war” against drugs, I recall to mind Ka Frisco’s observation.
President Duterte never promised the fight against drugs as some kind of soft-glove treatment against those who would “destroy his country, destroy the children’s future.” He was unequivocal, even during the campaign when “softening” may have been politically correct, that “it would be bloody.”
Ka Frisco mentioned how the Civil War united and steeled the backbone of the American people. And how our “revolution” did not lead to a decisive victory against the Spaniards, having been preempted by America’s “manifest destiny,” and how America ruled us later with the co-optation of our “ilustrados.”
There are of course several events in the history of nations that suggest that some kind of bloody upheaval precedes the ascent of nations to greatness.
This article would be too long on history and too short for the moment for me to cite those examples. As Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales suggested to a congressman who inquired about her office, “google it.”
In any case, never in recent history have we experienced the kind of catharsis that PRRD’s war against drugs and criminality has created.
Edsa One was a revolt all right, but no blood was shed. Edsa Dos, where a duly elected president’s impeachment was aborted by mass action, was neither revolt nor bloody.
President Duterte’s war against drugs, expanded to all forms of criminality and corruption, may just be the catharsis that this country needs to finally break out from its self-cocooning lethargy and indifference to nationhood.
And from thereon, proceed in proper and vision-driven cadence to its march towards national greatness.
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Speaker Pantaleon “Bebot” Alvarez is proving to be a non-traditional politician leading what has always been a “traditional” body.
In just the previous week, he did two things one would not expect from a Speaker of the House. First, he ordered the recall of privilege plates, the Number “8” that congressmen and even their families attached to their vehicles.
Was there ever a speaker in recent history who eschewed the trappings of high office, and who had the guts to order the same disdain for trappings to infect his flock?
And then, in Tacloban last Saturday, wearing a collarless red shirt, so atypical of his predecessors who were always elegantly attired, Alvarez not only called for the postponement of the barangay and SK elections, he also poured criticisms against the system itself.
He wondered aloud why there should be Sangguniang Kabataan’s (SK) at all. And in very commonsensical language, he said those youth should be in school.
And then he asked why there was any need for barangay “kagawads”, the councilmen, when the real action officer should be just the barangay kapitan, now called chairman simply because he presided over a gaggle of kagawads.
Does this guy not covet higher office, a traditional politician would ask, else, why alienate an army of politictians in the barangays? What would his congressmen say about this leader of theirs who wants to write finis to the career of their political cadres?
Well, in the era of Digong, Bebot is simply being Bebot, your everyday reliable guy. No frills, no pomp and circumstance, just, in the words of the president, a “fellow worker” in government.
