THIS is the worst of times
By Noralyn Mustafa
Inquirer News Service

When you live in a country where things are not what they seem, and they become more surreal every day with every big news on television and radio, and in newspapers; and Winston Garcia, president/general manager of the Government Service Insurance System, digs a deeper hole with his every pronouncement; and you wonder in total amazement how Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye can say the things he says with a straight face; and you steadily lose control over your capacity to survive with the continually escalating prices; and those among us who dare protest are hosed down with water cannons while truncheons are wielded to crack their skulls and break their bones; and you feel that you and everybody else-except Garcia, Bunye and their ilk-are trapped in a tailspin down the tunnel of doom, while Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo sails off with wind in her hair, life without care, to go scuba-diving in her and Garcia's favorite place; what can you do?

Call another "people power," some are suggesting. I disagree.

We cannot afford losing again the best and brightest among our youth as we did 30 years ago. That will leave us with a future too dismal to contemplate, with no other alternative than the likes of Bong Revilla, Lito Lapid and Mikey Arroyo, all of whom, like Garcia, have been inflicted on us by Ms Arroyo.

Besides, the "Edsa people power" was when the Filipinos rose in full force to remove a dictator. In Edsa in January 2001, it was the so-called civil society rising in full force to install another one.

It is well for us to remember the day, 32 years ago, when Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed martial law. Unless we've been lobotomized, we should be able to see that we are now living in the grip of martial rule. The big difference between now and 1972 is that Marcos told us about it (although he lied about the date) and he had a mandate. Aside from that, Marcos, at least, was brilliant.

Today, our worst nightmare as a nation is again upon us, and proving this is Winston Garcia declaring, "I gave the order to disperse them," with the confidence and authority worthy only of a president, after the images of protesters being truncheoned, hosed and tear-gassed were shown on the TV screen.

It is well for us to remember. It is well for us to heed an old saying: "Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa paroroonan (Those who don't look back to their origins will never reach their destinations)."
We cannot -- like recently freed Malaysian former deputy Anwar Ibrahim -- just say "It's over and we have to move on."

In our case, despite such pathetic stop-gaps as the so-called Bayanihan Fund, the much trumpeted "10-Point Agenda," the attempts at "reconciliation," we simply cannot budge from where we are mired because the way ahead is littered with the corpses of unfinished business, and the past relentlessly haunts us with its ghosts.

We have, for one, this messy habit of exposing wrongdoings with the enthusiasm of screaming banshees and then, just when we have the perpetrator by the neck, we drop him and devote our energies to finding out whether the P10,500 that Keanna Reeves said was her asking price, was for "isang ganunan lang."

Worse, we dismiss her truth with humiliating laughter, even as she has exposed all her emotional innards for our depraved entertainment.

Although talking of a quite different matter, it is worthwhile to quote Interior Secretary Angelo Reyes: "After damaging institutions...we just say kalimutan na natin 'yan?"

"We should not lose our capacity for outrage," Sen. Joker Arroyo tells us. "Otherwise, we will find ourselves morally and intellectually disarmed."

And so we do.

Has anybody been held to account for the atrocities of the martial law regime?

When Ms Arroyo vowed not to run yet she did; when she declared she was "married to the country," yet directed Mike Defensor to undertake the Great Helicopter Rescue; when Ms Arroyo emptied the government coffers for her campaign; when she appointed Benjamin Abalos to head the Commission on Elections to ensure her grip on the presidency; when the Gang of Four proclaimed the legitimacy of her presidency while we were sleeping; when she used her office to appoint all those to whom she is indebted, and thus we have a Winston Garcia who has become the metaphor of her kind of governance; we acquiesced as a people totally devoid of memory.

And so we have a lot of deadweights in our path. We don't know whose money was deposited in the Jose Pidal account, or whether there really was one. We don't know whether Abalos really did mess up the elections.

And we may never know whether Garcia really absconded with those billions of money that belong to the hundreds of thousands lowly government employees. Worst of all, we don't even know whether Ms Arroyo really won our mandate. But we do know that Keanna is all of 33 years old and was paid P10,500 for "isang ganunan lang."

It is because of this that we are carrying the heaviest burden of all: a leadership stripped of credibility.

In stressing the importance of character in leadership, John Maxwell said that people should trust their leaders. "If you lose that trust, you really lose your leadership," citing former US President Bill Clinton who, he said "lost his moral authority because he lied to the people."

"You should be able to believe your president," Michael Moore said in an interview. "If we don't have that, what are we left with?"

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