Unintended political consequences?
What makes life interesting and exciting is really the uncertainty of events. No one really knows for sure or with certainty if events will happen, so we are always thinking of possibilities and probabilities. The whole point of managing our lives, our business, or the country is to improve the possibility/probability of our desired outcomes to happen at the time we want them to happen. We plan, organize, implement and control because we believe that if we do all these things, the effect is what we desire them to be. We believe in the cause and effect most of the time.
When there are outcomes or results which were not as we expected, we review all our prior actions and the environment before, during and after the event to determine what went wrong in the hope that we can still correct it or at least not to let it happen again. Despite all of these, there are still a number of unintended consequences that happen, and these are more pronounced in the political field than in other milieu. The reason for this is the greater number of variables and the volatility of the variables in politics, which makes political events management more unpredictable.
The best political example of this phenomenon at this time is the Marcos initiatives to manage the re-entry of the Marcoses into the political scene. The entry of the Marcos family into the political arena in their bailiwick in Ilocos and parts of Leyte seems to be fine. Then the election of Bongbong as senator and then a run for the vice presidency with the alliance of DU30 still seem to be fine. But the burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani was an overreach, then the celebration on Sept. 18 and the holiday declaration in Ilocos, and then the working non-holiday on Sept. 21, awakened the consciousness of majority of the people. The martial law victims, those who had experienced martial law in their time, the millennials, and all those opposed to Marcos came to life and with a vengeance.
The main media were running stories and articles 70% to 30 percent against the Marcoses. The social media was at 65 percent to 35 percent anti-Marcos. Stories of the arrest, torture and disappearances surfaced again and books, plays, movies and TV interviews of victims were all over. There are now brick and mortar and online museums about martial law. There is even a new protest song adopted from "Les Miserables", which protest the martial law then and now, if it will be declared. All of these were not really anticipated by the Marcos strategists, and at this point will be very difficult to contain as it has gained momentum.
Part of the reason behind these unintended political consequences, is the fast changing and volatile environment of the DU30 government. From a high approval rating after the elections, the ratings have been slowly coming down. Then, in the last few months the issues of the EJKs, the youth killings, the Customs smuggling that dragged down the DU30 family, the impeachments of CJ Sereno and Bautista, the CHR budget, the immunity proposal for congressmen, the faked accounts of Trillanes, and the allegations of corruption by Ex-Sec Salalima all make for a very bad backdrop for any initiatives from the Marcoses. These were the variables that were unpredictable, and even if they were, no equation with multiple variables would be able to put them on the blackboard.
If you are a religious person, you would likely ascribe these events as God's will. If you are a child of the universe, you would believe that the universe is unfolding as it should.
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