Amadeo in his usual masterful prose has written:

Pardon my heresy but I find it hard to believe that electing a national president could be that elementally crucial to life, or no, maybe just so life- or game-changing (?) for an entire country of people. Isn’t it that after all we go through this process every several years? For the last 60 some years (excuse or strike out the Marcos interregnum)? A few times for the better and at other times for the worse?

In the last US presidential elections, a good number of people did harbor such a game-changing possibility with the historic election of Obama. Though I admit I did not get caught up by that euphoric tide. As a matter of fact I mailed my absentee ballot early and promptly headed for the old homeland.

But one year later of hard reality and if you scan through the US political firmament, things have not really changed that much. Some partisan and not so partisan sectors would say there is a decided turn for the worse, but the President’s remaining loyal constituencies think otherwise and declare the US is on the right track to a renewed revival of greatness and amity with the rest of the world.

And life goes on as usual.

Are we there yet, meaning the end of global recession?

But please do not get me wrong, electing a president is serious business. But here’s hoping we do not get into a frenzied tizzy trying to find out if one of the many self-anointed is indeed The One or the savior even with a small “s”.

Unless the expanded field of candidates is fraught with scheming wolves in sheep’s clothing? Then please proselytize me.

I will try, Amadeo.

In less than a year of Obama’s presidency, the US has regained the trust and respect of the world. (It’s not just the “President’s remaining loyal constituencies” who believe in this; Obama was awarded a Nobel Prize for it, remember?)

That is change.

The war of choice the US has waged in Iraq is definitely ending.

That is change.

By the prompt and decisive action of President Obama, what would have been a perilously impending plunge into another Great Depression in the US and then to a possible global economic disaster has been averted.

That is change.

A woman of Hispanic stock now sits as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court.

That is change.

For those who lost their jobs, whose houses were foreclosed on, or are without the means to have affordable health care even when very sick, you may be right that “life goes on as usual.”

But only a couple of days ago, Obama made it known that he’s just warming up. In a remarkable event unprecedented in US history, Obama repaired to the Republican den and unscripted, without teleprompters, live on national TV, debated with his congressional critics, mostly white people, and then he schooled them, all 140 of them, like middle-school children.

That is change.

Yes, when he first announced his bid for the US presidency, this affable young man (whose lovely wife is a descendant of a slave, whose father was an African and a Muslim, who speaks Indonesian and plays hoop with his buddies in a White House backyard just like a Black kid in his neighborhood) was considered by many as a political lightweight (whose only meaningful experience, the noxious tagging during the campaign has gone on, was supposedly just as a “community organizer”).

Obama is now the president of the strongest nation in the world whose bust could be bound for carving at Mt. Rushmore someday.

That is change.

Noynoy Aquino III of the Philippines gets the same label that’s been heaped on Obama from suspected paid hacks disguising as media practitioners– a “political lightweight” (just as FPJ, a very successful entrepreneur in his own right, had gotten the consistent title whenever his name was mentioned as the presidential candidate who was a “high-school dropout”).

When the labeling is repeated too often, it could have the potential of affecting the confidence of otherwise well-meaning political onlookers, like our leytenian, in the “ability to lead, skills, and . . . experience” of Noynoy reducing them to only “(sensing) him as an emotional choice” despite their honest belief that Noynoy is “nice” – because to them and rightly so “that’s not what it takes.”

Yet, Noynoy Aquino has been a three-term congressman, is a senator of the Republic, and although often preferring not to seek the limelight an untiring “fiscalizer” in the tradition of his illustrious father.

Noynoy is the same young man who very early on had learned the darker side of political contestation, Philippine-style, in the school of hard knocks. He witnessed how his famous dad while incarcerated was mocked and abused by the dictatorship, saw his siblings grow up without the physical presence and guidance of a father and suffered the painfully traumatic experience of his family having been forsaken in the most trying of times by people who they thought were dear friends and allies.

And when the mantle of national leadership was passed on to his mother, Noynoy found himself in the thick of repeated violent power struggles that almost cost him his life.

The myth peddled by partisans that Noynoy is a political lightweight too shy to face the public has been wholly unraveled, fortunately, when he took center stage before the nation’s business leaders who found him too presidential not to be admired. He was better, even sharper (as Obama was before his interlocutors) in the Q & A that followed. And like Obama, Noynoy during the exchange has exuded confidence and those other sterling qualities of a leader that have been observed.

Change is “extremely possible,” Noynoy assured his audience notwithstanding that when he first announced his aspiration for the presidency he was brutally forthright in his acrid assessment of the malaise of our society: “Matindi ang kabulukang bumabalot sa ating lipunan.”

Respectfully confident, viciously honest Noynoy was before a sternly scrutinizing public.

That gives hope for change.

The solutions Noynoy offered to certain perennial problems that have long crippled the nation are commonsensical and immediately enforceable as those are well within the powers of the president to accomplish: prompt collection of taxes that are due, punishment of tax evaders and smugglers, and in general the curtailment of graft and corruption (which for the most of the Arroyo administration have cost the nation a mind-boggling amount – about a trillion pesos). Noynoy’s commitment to solve these problems is decidedly unmistakable.

That gives hope for change.

Noynoy remains unequivocal in his resolve to hold Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo accountable for what she has done to make our country go so terribly wrong.

That gives hope for change.

The special ability as well as the skill or experience that it takes for a leader to fulfill at least these basic promises first will be nothing less than plain integrity and political will. Filipinos, or an overwhelming majority of them, believe Noynoy possesses those indispensable qualities.

That gives hope for change.

But then again, like Obama, Noynoy cannot do this promised transformation by himself. More than anything else, true transformation requires collective resolve, or Bayanihan effort and spirit to uproot the system in place. Hinda ka nag-iisa. That was our promise to Ninoy before.

Ninoy was not The One.

Cory was not The One.

Noynoy is not The One.

We are.

We are The Ones.

That gives hope for change.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function p75HasVideo() in /homepages/39/d169067170/htdocs/voices/wp-content/themes/NewFV/single-default.php on line 57