Character vs polls: Two kinds of redemption

Imagine you spent 20 years restoring a family name that half the country held in contempt. You worked the provinces; you smiled through the insults and in 2022 you got everything you ever wanted: a landslide, the house your father lost, the chance to write a new chapter.

Three years in, the auditors walk into your office. Projects your government paid for do not exist. Contractors who got rich were cleared by your own department. Some of the people who carried you to the landslide are in the files, and one of them is your cousin. Now you are at the fork. You can keep quiet, blame the last administration and finish your term with the applause intact. Or you can open the books and blow up your own house.

Most of us have met a smaller version of that fork. The padrino who got you the job and later asked for a cut. The compadre treasurer whose receipts do not add up. The star salesman who is also the thief. We know what most people do. They look away, because looking away is cheap and it feels like loyalty. That is the honest baseline for judging what Ferdinand Marcos Jr. did.

In July last year he stood before Congress and told the thieves to be ashamed of themselves, then ordered the list published: P545 billion in flood control projects. He walked a riverbank in Bulacan and found no wall.

He created a commission, accepted three Cabinet resignations and opened the books: a portal with every public works project since 2016 and COMPASS, a public funds tracker that lets any Filipino follow a peso from appropriation to disbursement, made permanent by executive order on Sept. 28. By July there were 26 cases and 45 accused, two senators and a former Cabinet member among them.

In September the Sandiganbayan ordered the arrest of the former speaker of the House, his first cousin, on a plunder charge over flood control funds. The former speaker denies any wrongdoing and is presumed innocent.

Then the bill came, as anyone could have predicted. His approval fell to 29 percent in July, the lowest of his term, and barely moved in September. Fifty thousand people filled Luneta in September last year, and by November some were chanting for his resignation. He lost his speaker, the Senate changed presidents three times in a year, a former congressman who fled the country accuses him from abroad in videos the Palace calls hearsay, the Vice President told him to resign and the Armed Forces chief confirmed that retired officers tried to recruit active ones, “even to me.”

Growth slowed to 2.3 percent in the second quarter, the weakest outside the pandemic since 2009, because public construction fell by a third while every project was checked.

He saw it coming. “I don’t blame them. Not one bit,” he said of the protesters, before the march. “Masakit man sa akin ito,” he told Congress in July, “ngunit kailangan nating gawin ang tama.” It hurts, but we must do what is right. Six weeks later the warrant for his cousin was issued.

Here is what I think this is about. There are two kinds of redemption. The first is validation: other people deciding you were right all along. The 2022 landslide was that kind. Thirty-one million votes told the family its story had been forgiven or at least outvoted. It is intoxicating and it is fragile, because what a crowd gives a crowd can take back, and the crowd at Luneta took some of it back.

The second kind is character: becoming, at the fork, a person the record cannot argue with. No amount of external validation can give you that; and nobody can revoke it. It does not depend on approval ratings, on the Vice President’s opinion or on what people have said about his father. It depends on one thing: what you did, when doing what is right cost you what you wanted most.

On that test, the man who had everything chose to blow it up rather than keep it dishonestly. That is the only redemption that is real, and it is the one that comes with condemnation from the very people you used to count on.

An honest assessment keeps both columns. The scandal was his to prevent, and the exposé came after the July floods, not before them. Charges are not convictions, and this country has watched charges evaporate before. The trackers run on executive orders, which die with their author. Critics call it theater, and some call it selective.
All of that can be true and the fork still stands: he had a quiet option, and he did not take it.

John F. Kennedy wrote “Profiles in Courage” about politicians who defied their own side and paid for it. His test was never whether a man was good. It was whether he knew the price and paid it anyway. “A man does what he must,” he wrote, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures, and that is the basis of all human morality.” I run a company regulated by the government, so discount me as you see fit. I will keep arguing with this government where I think it’s wrong.

But whatever else is said about Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and much will be, the record of the last 15 months says that at the fork, he did what he must and paid in full view. The legacy still depends on convictions, a clean 2027 budget and a law that keeps the trackers alive.

The character does not. For that, and only that, a salute.