By Jonathan Dela Cruz
From Day One, President Duterte’s critics have been on a bitching binge, making it appear to those who care to listen in our country and in the world that he is the nation’s curse personified.
Alternating between crying foul over alleged human rights violations in the administration’s war on drugs and its collateral impact including the detention of Senator Leila de Lima and shaming him all over the place and threatening him with impeachment, these critics must have expected that their every call will be met with approbation as has been their wont in the previous administration.
But that has not been so. Instead, the country has moved on and our people have given President Duterte high approval ratings to this day. The crisis these critics have been hoping would happen has been largely in their minds.
Lately, with the ouster of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, the ante has been upped with calls for retribution complete with walk outs and marches over the “loss of judicial independence” and the country’s plunge into dictatorial rule. Now, the calls for Duterte’s ouster has become shriller over the spike in the price of oil and other commodities and, yes, over China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, a.k.a. the West Philippine Sea. The vast majority have largely ignored these calls and are making do with what they have and can afford in these trying times. The crisis remains up in the air.
It appears that our people have better things to do than indulge in never-ending calls for Duterte to change his ways and do what his critics tell him to do. If they have something else to offer—like solutions to the hundred and one problems the country is facing every day which these guys have yet to articulate.
What should we do with the war on drugs, for example? Wait for the drug menace to envelop the entire country altogether? Leave the communities with all kinds of zombies roaming their streets and committing all kinds of mayhem? Plead with the drug syndicates to stop their illegal trade? Have more centers for drug dependents? What practical, immediate and sustainable solutions can these guys offer?
Nothing of the sort that the administration has opted to do and for which an overwhelming majority of citizens have approved.
What should we do with Sereno’s fall from grace then now that the woman has pleaded for reconsideration before the very Court which voted to oust her?
If, as the ousted chief and her confederates have been saying all along, that the high tribunal has become an appendage of Malacañang instead of being an independent branch of government, a willing tool of a vindictive President, then why go through this process at all? Why petition for reconsideration at all while in the same breath say one third of the entire court is biased? Why go through the trouble when one is already convinced that this Court cannot be trusted to do the right and just thing?
Therein lies the real crisis.
The critics continue living in their own world. They seem to be impervious to the fact that things are no longer the same. That there are indeed changes which have come about since President Duterte came
to town. They just can’t accept that the writ, the manner by which things should be done which they have come to tightly embrace over their time in office, as it were, just a little more than a year ago can no longer hold. Apparently, their sense of place and entitlement has become a kind of second skin they cannot shed.
They better start waking from their daydream. The world is moving on. Our people appear to have been so inured from all of the hopeful promises of a better future, the calls and moves of service to the people which so inveigled them in the past that any repeat of the same has become hollow and ineffective. The world is turning and things are changing which, in the majority’s view, may not be as clear and effective but better than business-as-usual.
President Duterte offered to change things and he is doing so in his own unorthodox way. Our people have come to accept this kind of exceptionalism. The critics continue to spew the same tired lines and offer business-as-usual solutions. So the President is getting his way.
