EDITORIAL - Why is there so much ado about nothing?

Nothing is etched in stone in politics. In politics, there are no permanent friends, or enemies for that matter, only permanent interests. So, when Cebu City councilors Dave Tumulak and Hans Abella unceremoniously dumped Team Rama to make themselves available for picking by the other side, they were simply being themselves. And while erstwhile allies Jun Alcover and Joel Garganera can rightfully grow livid with anger, calling the two traitors is the wrong description to use.

Treachery is not an operative word in the lexicon of politicians, but only because allowing its use only implicates and embarrasses everybody. The unwritten rule is that one politician must never call another a traitor, especially when looking at oneself in the mirror. But once self-incrimination is avoided, it is open season for calling all politicians anything under the sun.

Alcover and Garganera can take their cue from there and hound Tumulak and Abella with everything they got in their verbal arsenal. In fact, short of libel and murder, they can go after the two with all that our Philippine brand of politics may allow. If our top national officials can go at it tooth and nail before the world, what is to stop loose factotums in the grassroots from clawing and hissing in the bushes and swamps.

Political cockfights have become an entertaining diversion for a citizenry weighed down by unsolvable problems. They offer a respite from the endless cares of their unprofitable days. People have long stopped expecting anything resembling leadership and authority from politicians, and woe unto those politicians who naively think otherwise.

Take Tumulak, for instance, who to this day keeps harping about independence being the reason for his bolting the party under which he won the right to be called honorable. What does Tumulak take the Cebuanos for, mga tanga? Maybe he should just learn the virtue of silence. Not having expected anything from him when they voted him into office, an act that means nothing more than a fulfillment of civic obligation, Cebuanos do not expect anything from him now that he is in office.

Cebu City residents have long resigned themselves to the fact that no matter who they elect into office, they are not going to get anything for the effort and it is an unending source of wonderment that they keep on voting in election after election in keeping with a process that they know holds absolutely nothing for them. Just consider this — it has been two months since a new set of officials has taken office but what has happened in all that time? Absolutely nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing, if political antics are to be considered and counted. But who cares where councilors go? The only air they disturb in their comings and goings is the aura of self-importance they wrap around themselves.

Where they end up does not put food on the table or a roof over the head. It eases not traffic nor solves flooding. And yet the irrelevant thinks it significant to stress independence in a sea of interests. Nothing moving through nothingness produces nothing.