Why divide our country?

The headline of a national broad sheet last Sunday seemed to tell me all.  That we are a divided country, as opposed to the ideal of "one nation," was the message. There were events in the past few days that somehow, essayed the perception that something has gone so wrong that our dreams and aspirations as one people are irreversibly fragmented.

To check whether I got correctly the message contained in the paper's banner story, I tried recalling what I thought were two most dominant incidents that took place recently. It was my intention to match them with the news stories spread in the daily.

The first incident that came to my mind was the arrest of Senator Leila de Lima. There were times in the past that elected high officials of our land were ordered jailed. Joseph Estrada was the first president of the republic to have been incarcerated followed by another president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Well, Estrada's prison and Arroyo's hospital room were not really jails in our usual concept of the term but the fact was that they were subjects of warrants of arrest for appropriate detention mattered.

Then, three senators, also upon apparently lawful judicial orders, were likewise imprisoned. However differently conditioned their jails were compared to the cells of ordinary criminal did not seem to matter to us more than the fact that they were deprived of their liberty pending resolutions of their respective cases.

The case of De Lima did not appear to me as of the same nature as those of Estrada and company. While Estrada, and others, became the subject of meticulous and protracted investigations, there was indecent haste combined with nebulous accusations that seemed to attend to the situation of De Lima.

In fact, a video footage showed by a national television, a number of times, gave me the angle why the senator gathered sizeable support. In that file photo President Rodrigo Roa Duterte said that he would "destroy (Senator De Lima), in public". But, nowhere in the same footage did it contain any reason of the president to predicate his plan to "destroy the senator." It looked like the president was on a personal vendetta. It therefore did not surprise me that public sympathy grounded on a cry for justice seemed to pour for the lady legislator. The president's insistence to withhold information that could be tied to public welfare, as distinguished from private wrong, generated the support for the senator resulting into the perceived division of this country. If the president only gave us a hint why he was so obsessed to destroy the lawmaker, perhaps our people would not have been so parlayed into opposing quarters.

The second incident was the yearly celebration of the so-called EDSA Revolution. I thought there was only one such event to recall. Without bloodshed, we put an end to a dictatorship. That was the event and there was a particular place, EDSA, where such part of our history was written.

Yet, why should we divide our nation with gathering another crowd, mandated by a memorandum issued by the government, to dwell on another topic like generating support for the president? Why should the president diminish the importance of EDSA and mass another group designed not to commemorate the peaceful revolution but instead to declare allegiance to him?

Has the apparent presidential imprimatur for the slaughter of thousands of suspected drug addicts made the president so paranoid that he would treat EDSA a world-acclaimed peaceful revolt with grave apprehension? Why Mr. President would you light the wick of our division?