Martial law
I would not be surprised if the people who, to this day, continue to raise the specter of martial law, are not themselves secretly wishing for President Duterte to actually place the entire country under military rule. After all, he has already slapped it over the whole of Mindanao.
These people want Duterte to declare martial law over the entire Philippines because, one, it would give them the push they lack to topple him, which is their real agenda, and two, it would validate their assertion that the president is a dictator, a claim that Duterte continues to repudiate at every turn.
If these people so fear and loathe martial law, why the hell are they ignoring the fact that Mindanao has been under a state of martial law for more than a year now? The reason is, of course, very obvious. The martial law in Mindanao is not what they had hoped it would be.
Because of martial law, there is largely peace and order in that once violence-prone island. And while there are indeed occasional disruptions to life there, they are of the sort that can happen anywhere. What is remarkable is that none of the bad things that the martial law-mongers had wished to descend on the island has happened.
In short the Mindanao martial law has not given these people what they had hoped would topple Duterte, or at least make his leadership weak enough for them to capitalize on toward making their own political capital more robust than the moribund state that it is in right now.
And that is why these people, at the drop of a hat, and for whatever excuse they can find, would never hesitate to bring up the specter of a martial law that happened decades ago under an entirely different set of circumstances and motivations. If these people have not moved on after all these years, it is not because they cannot. It is because they refuse to.
Now, if they refuse to, that is a choice they apparently made. But they have no right to hold hostage the rest of the nation who may have other plans for their own future. I do not dispute the abuses and atrocities that may have happened in that martial law of long ago. But just because the experience was bitter to some does not mean it was for all the rest.
We may honor and extol the bravery and sacrifice of those who suffered, but it besmirches the same memory to insist that everybody sing the same song if they think the lyrics do not tell the truth about their own experiences. What is the sunset for some is sunrise for everybody else. No amount of breast-beating can change that simple fact of life.
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