It feels like a life time ago when I greeted you, “Good Morning Manila: The Assess Have it!” You know, that was nearly two months ago. In that span of time, the world was asked, if Neda fell in a desert, would we hear her? Not long after that Michael Jackson was doing the Thriller in real life and his multitude of fans around the world remembered him.
When Philippine House Resolution 1109 was passed we tend to forget that that bastion of truth, that guardian of Filipino democracy called Old Media also slept while you slept, Manila. They failed utterly to be your eyes and your ears at a moment when you most needed them to be. Old Media prefers and continue to be enamored with Kho and the spiteful and scorned women in his life, who in turn prefer to wash their laundry in public rather than discuss the nation’s business.
I remember the Cry of Cyberspace. As the Filipino House was about to be robbed, @mlq3 raised the alarm. I remember @caffeinesparks, our eyes and ears at the Batasan. I remember her tweets and twitter was our only vector as the House of Representatives legalized sanity. I remember how Sparks stood her ground when asked to be evicted from her place at the gallery. We’ve captured those tweets, to remember, to make history remember:
#conass twitter stream archive
Let us take pause. What really happened as the House called for a Constituent Assembly, and as we Oppose Constituent Assembly?
This isn’t Blackest Night (free and legal e-Book in PDF). In the coming months, there won’t be an epic battle between Krypto the SuperDog and Dex-Starr the Rage Kitty. Though, there is something to be said about the blue light of Hope is useless without green light of Willpower.
Sad to say the script to #conass was not written and drawn (respectively) by the Einsner Award (for All Star Superman) winning Dynamic Duo of Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly. And if we lift our eyes up to the sky, is because we have faith in the Dynamic Duo, together again, to have power to save us from our own superpower to screw up (click to see larger image):
But there isn’t any hero to descend from the sky, is there?
What all this comes down to is that for the congressional dream of “Arroyo Forever” to become a reality, (1) three-fourths of all the combined majority of House and Senate must vote for it, (2) the Senate must supinely do nothing, (3) the Supreme Court must come in as an indispensable accomplice, and (4) should hell break loose in the streets, the military must be willing to mow down the sovereign people.
I may be thoroughly naïve, but in my view it is very difficult for all of these elements to converge. (1) The House may not be able to muster the desired majority. There still are honorable men and women among them. (2) The senators as one, we are told, will fight back. (3) I think better of the Supreme Court justices than to see them as complicit in treason. (4) The military showed in 1986 that it knows which direction to take when the chips are down.
— “Making sense of 1109” by Fr. Joaquin G. Bernas, S.J.
What happens now? Charter Change, per se isn’t wrong, it is the manner by which the men and women addicted to power chooses to pervert the system under the guise of what is good for us all.
We have an obligation to know who we are! We must listen to Bigenya’s “A Call for Sobriety“. We must know where we are to Get A Grip, and avoid the folly of good intensions, that we can meet this and the challenges of our nation building, with our eyes open.
I tweeted of conass that “the Philippines is an example of how a Republic can slowly die, without fanfare save for a few tweets to chronicle the beginning of its end”. And weeks after it all began, is this the calm before the storm? Is this the state of our nation?
Whether you join Blog Action Day against CoAss or not; whether you oppose Constituent Assembly or not, and whether you agree or disagree with Arroyo, this is the part where I hope these words from Sun Tzu do not fall on deaf ears and that you take from it some measure of wisdom: The victorious army first realizes the conditions for victory, and then seeks to engage in battle. The vanquish army fights first, and then seeks victory. These conditions for victory is true too for nation building.
This is for blog action day versus conass.
*Who owns those images?
NoToConAss: words by Marck Ronald Rimorin, Badge: Andrew Dela Serna, hosting and domain by Gail Villanueva.
Bloggers Kapihan is where the blog action day badge is from.
Image of Batman and Robin is from “Batman and Robin Issue 1″, August 2009. It was drawn by Frank Quietly, script by Grant Morrison, and published by DC Comics; used here under fair use.
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Isn’t it dumb — no classes at all for all?
For “Iglesia Ni Kristo” Celebration Day?
CON ASS was an attempt of Gloria Arroyo and her cahoots to perpetuate
her rule. It was fortunate we have alarmed citizens who were
fast in countering the attempt. The Internet played also a crucial
role in stopping the attempt.
It was a coup d’ etat in the makling. We stopped it. We are all
heroes. Now it is history, like the EDSAs.
Don’t flatter yourselves. Do you really believe that all your angsty tweeting and whatnot makes any impression at all on the country’s power brokers?
But let’s suppose your assessment is right and mine is wrong. So now what? Have you really won, when you successfully defended the machinery that has been the source of all your woes? Or is that by stopping the con-ass, you have made it possible for a hero to fix everything that’s wrong with that machine? If so, who is it? And what is it that makes he or she different than what you’ve had up to now?
the whole “con ass” protest rides piggy back on the fraudulent claim, promoted by the partisan media, that it’s nothing more than a vehicle to keep gma in power – a higly speculative proposition that has been repeatedly denied by the president herself. to the “vacuous” public, including clueless students and children, the constant barrage of fear-mongering and hysterical propaganda masqueraded as “news”, the con-ass proposal has been so demonized that it’s regarded as the most fearsome thing to avoid. the ruse rivals the best of goebbels’ concoction.
Oh Reality Check,
Reality Check,
where hast thou gone,
leaving poor Bencard here
alone
to rationalize for the empowered crustaceans
of bent moral fiber?
Joe
better alone and right than a crowd that’s wrong. truth doesn’t depend on popularity. you can herd all the squatters in payatas, misguided students of schools near and far, even school children who hardly know what a constitution means, and mix them with red-headband ideologues, out-of-power trapos, disgruntled ex-officials, assorted power-seekers and wannabes, or “trajos” and quixotic bloggers who do not fully understand the whys and wherefores of their advocacy, and still you cannot transform falsehood into truth.
Very true.
I dunno man. To focus on an effort aimed at supposedly prevent from happening something that has no proven causal relationship with the country’s prospects for prosperity is a bit silly of you ask me.
And yet we ignore a more disturbing reality that none of the players who supposedly “participate” in all this ocho-ocho nonsense have put forth a coherent alternative to the banal stupidity that pervades Pinoy society.
As always, the challenge is quite simple: Platform, plez.