I confess. I urged the President to disobey the law. I cheered when he defied a High Court order. And yes, I will not hesitate to do it again. If this is contempt, a crime against the Constitution, I plead guilty: guilty as charged.
Ever since the DAP decision, a frantic chorus of analysts, apologists, paid hacks and the left have tried to badger us into believing the sky would fall should the President so much as utter a single word against a Supreme Court ruling. On cue, hordes of bullies, bashers, nincompoops and trolls have swarmed the internet to launch frenzied attacks against him.
But of course the sky will not fall, the heavens won’t budge, and our world will not end, whatever the President decides to do. We know because it has not already fallen. In disobeying the TRO that would have allowed Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to escape, the President has already defied the Court and, skies intact, we are much the better for it. We removed an unscrupulous chief justice, jailed a plunderous former president, charged three powerful senators for receiving kickbacks. According to World Bank head Jim Yong Kim, the Philippines is now fighting corruption “better than any government in the world.” Under the Aquino administration, we have grown our economy at speeds that have made us, in the words of Spanish Charge D’Affaires Ignacio Cambra, “a rising economic tiger.” Our streets are rife with talk of revolution, of lofty dreams. We all want to change our world and regained the faith that we can do it. This will be the President’s greatest legacy, the reason he will be remembered long after our time.
Why then recoil at the minutest threat to the established order? Why bristle at the slightest challenge to a parochial position? Smarting from what he perceived as attacks against the Supreme Court, a friend who has devoted much of his life fighting for the kind of change made real by the Aquino administration could hardly conceal his glee when he opined that P-Noy would now have to compromise with the next administration lest he go to jail. How poorly he judges the President’s character and courage, his stubborn will to do what is right. Indeed, if P-Noy’s detractors could have their way, they would send the President to prison for the Disbursement Acceleration Program, the DAP that made 7.2% GDP growth possible, the performance of our economy one of Asia’s best, our country a rising star. Simply put, they want to unchange our world.
A ragtag gang they are, these bandits who would steal our dreams, each one pining for their own lost paradise: a kleptomaniac’s eden where they wined and dined on plundered treasures, leaving only their crumbs and unkept vows; where misery made for quick recruits; where a hero fell to cold-blooded fire that we might be free to dream again.
You say you want a revolution. You want to change the world. Then let’s not be schizophrenic about it. Institutions and revolutions are an unholy mix. Both yearn for the heart and soul of a nation. Both guard their missions with zeal. Revolutions seek to tear down structures. Institutions to build and preserve them. Together too long and one devours the other. Our sole precarious escape is for our institutions to move forward united in pursuit of revolutionary change, each through its own volition. The future of a hundred million Filipinos demands no less. The legislature is already in step with the President. If the magistrates of the Supreme Court in their wisdom decide to raise the prism through which they view the truth higher towards the direction of our sun, perhaps they will see that same truth in a different way, in the light of revolution, in the shadow of our loftiest dreams.
A revolution can be messy, ambiguous, grungy, deadly. It is no accident that the Beatles chose George’s distorted, overdriven guitar over Eleanor Rigby’s string quartet in the Lennon-McCartney classic from which I borrow here. You say you want a revolution. Then don’t just point the gun. Squeeze the trigger.