As he was being brought to the hospital after an assassination attempt, former vice president Emmanuel Pelaez asked Gen Tomas Karingal, the chief of the Quezon City Police, ‘What is happening to our country, General?’
That was back in 1982. What was happening to our country at the time was the Marcos dictatorship getting tiresome. A year later, the Marcos regime started to unravel.
Ninoy Aquino was assassinated and who had good reasons to want to see him dead? Our people gave Ninoy the longest, best attended and most heartfelt funeral that took the whole day.
Soon, our Central Bank was found to have cooked the books by claiming more dollars in our account than we had. Cesar Virata, the Marcos technocrat who was prime minister, had to bravely tell Mr. Marcos to ask his cronies to bring back a few hundred million dollars so we can pay our creditors and avoid a formal default.
Between 1983 and 1986, the Filipino people quietly seethed in anger, organized boycotts of products of Marcos crony companies, shredded the yellow pages of phone books to fill Ayala Avenue with a rain of yellow strips of paper from the top floors of buildings to show unity against the dictatorship.
Those were bad times. We lived through those times. And we not only survived but came out of it proud to be Filipinos. We forced a dictator and his family fleeing to exile in Hawaii. Democracy triumphed.
Our problem today is not having a single villain as a unifying focus. Our problem today is essentially us, for allowing our democratic system to deteriorate as badly as it had. Our elections are killing democracy, or its essence.
The shocking revelations about trillions of taxpayer money lost to senior political leaders and their conspirators have caused a stir in the public conscience. But not enough. Not like it was in the 80s.
While we might have thought it was possible to rid ourselves of the dictatorship in the 1980s, today there is a sense of cynicism. No one believes anything will come out of the public expressions of disgust other than algorithms working to make us think we did something.
It is generally felt that the government is just toying with us with promises of retribution that will bring the politicians and their fellow plunderers to jail by Christmas. A supposedly independent investigative body with no subpoena powers is seen as a sideshow to feed the people hope that the crooks will pay for their crimes.
Then there is the realization that under our current system, the most likely successor to BBM is a political nepo baby with no proven abilities for good governance and with a spotty track record in the use of public funds.
Democratic fatigue is creeping in. There is fear we may become another Myanmar with generals taking advantage of our faltering democracy. The increasing pressure of poverty, hunger and the frustration of unemployable college graduates are combining to kill faith in our democratic system.
To some of us, there is nowhere to go. Even the supposed bastion of democracy in the world for 250 years we looked up to, seems on the verge of giving up too.
The institutional guardrails that protect America’s democratic system are falling one after the other to a would-be autocrat in the White House. Congress has given up on its prerogatives and the Supreme Court has ruled in a way that diminishes the checks and balances designed into their system.
A recent column of David Brooks of the New York Times observed ‘the public has been rendered utterly cynical about government. Nothing is shocking anymore because there are no moral norms left standing. And in fact, there are good reasons to think that Americans simply don’t care about their democratic rights.’
Brooks continues: ‘In a diseased democracy a politician’s first instinct is to amass power by any means necessary. In a healthy democracy, politicians abide by a series of formal and informal restraints because those restraints are good for the nation as a whole. In a diseased democracy like ours all the decent rules and arrangements are destroyed. Anything goes.’
Anything goes. That’s also what’s happening to us. And we only got angry when the ghost infrastructure projects mess took the headlines. A kleptocratic cabal of four congressional leaders led a massive pillage of the Treasury. They have stolen over a trillion pesos by the time we got very angry.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote that when the amount of deviant behavior rises, people begin to redefine deviant behavior as normal. We have redefined corruption as normal and did nothing about it. The kleptocracy stealing us blind is simply being itself.
Until we realized that their greed is insatiable, we did nothing. A ‘normal’ kickback of 20 percent has become 100 percent. Only then did we react with anger. But for how long?
It’s worrisome that some think our problems have become too big to resolve under our democratic system. We need Constitutional change but don’t know if that’s possible.
We are almost a failed state. We can’t even quickly jail folks who have publicly confessed taking all that money which they spent in casinos and to buy fancy cars.
Three months after BBM, during his State of the Nation Address, called on congressmen and senators to show some shame, not one culprit in the corruption mess has seen a day in court.