Dear Manila,

I write this still stunned. The power, the speed and the tenacity by which Philippine House Resolution 1109 transforming Congress into a Constituent Assembly was adopted, it was simply mind over matter. Your valiant and dedicated Congressmen fought sleep and sanity and reason. The Eighth Republic as you slept, Manila, was conceived and dedicated and they dream for it to endure. This even as other more important legislation were set aside like the Reproductive Health Bill and measure on Comprehensive Agrarian Reform.

While you slept, the media whose promise has always been to inform the Filipino people, failed you miserably save for coverage from ABS-CBN’s News Channel and a handful of others. It failed to be your eyes and ears at a moment you most needed it. It preferred to put sex tapes and gossip above the national interest. Perhaps they thought you wouldn’t be interested or wouldn’t care. Ratings after all are important.

Even as Mainstream Media stood idly by despite repeated calls from many of those online to COVER IT, our primary vector was Twitter. It has become a messaging service that kept the fires going. And our noise and our grievance and our indignation could only be expressed here on Cyberspace. @caffeinesparks was our eyes and ears at the Batasan. She watched and tweeted as Congress legalized insanity. Soon enough streams started coming online. There was even a point, sparks was about to be evicted from her place at the gallery.

HR1109 is by no means the End. It could be the beginning of the end. When you wake up, slow and inept the defense for the Seventh Republic may be but I hope the people will challenge the House’s stupidity in every forum. For all its worth: I urge every Filipino from every walk of life, from across the globe to rise to its defense!  And our united opposition against this measure must not give any quarter. It must show every bit of tenacity that the Asses have displayed!

Don’t get me wrong. Charter Change, per se isn’t wrong. I believe there are many other ways to right this ship of state long before we have to evoke the option of playing with our Constitution. And as Corruption fuels this country, do you trust the men and women running it to change the very foundation of the Republic? To have every opportunity to pervert and twist this nation to their very image?

There are even pro-Charter Change like @faithlessphil who tweeted:

Here is the thing: I’m FOR a constitutional revision. Our joke of a senate is enough reason for change. But Jesus, not this way.

In more ways than one, definitely not this way.

The crime and cancer of corruption is everywhere, preying on the spirit of this nation. And as we witnessed a few weeks ago durning the Great Book Blockade of 2009, you, Manila, is hardly interested in fighting it.

Perhaps that’s the writing on the wall and many of us who insist otherwise, prefer to ignore it because we think it is wrong.

Like the Britain of Alan Moore’s book, V for Vendetta, Manila, you’ve surrendered responsibility for this country, preferring the relative entertainment of schadenfreude. You’ve decided to institutionalize idiocity, gossip and farce.

I tweeted this as the events of #conass unfolded:

#philippines is an example of how a republic can slowly die. w/o fanfare save for few tweets to chronicle the beginning of its end. #conass

This link to a twitter stream is the real-time indignation and opinion of real Filipinos. If you tweet, be sure to append on any part of your twitter post the hashtag #conass and your voice will be added to that stream. And oh, you don’t need a twitter account to read it. [FilipinoVoices is also streaming this copy, which you could find to the right of every page of this blog].

The railroaded ConAss was like Pearl Harbor, greeted by little defense. It wasn’t like Pearl Harbor because there was no shock nor awe that America felt at the time. There was the tweet, and plurk, and stream and post of a few because those were the only vector by which we could express our regret, our sadness and our fear that democracy might be dead and we willingly let it die.

If the Seventh Republic should die, one can only hope that the Eighth, no matter how it was conceived or born will not let its predecessor die in vain.

@cocoy

UPDATE/EDIT. This is an archive of #conass twitter stream, up until 0530 Manila time via @printyourtweets (PrintYourTweets.com):

#conass twitter stream archive

UPDATE-2 sorry, forgot to mention that it was @mlq3 who first shouted out online that this thievery was happening.

UPDATE-3 i’m including @mlq3’s archive of tweets since most of his tweets were not registered with #conass
Mlq3 Archive Conass

UPDATE-4 you should also check out The Four-Eyed Journal and Momblogger’s take on the whole ConAss issue.

(Photo credit: Tobias Engay, MRS-PRIB / 03 June 2009 10:37:47 AM via congress.gov.ph)

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