From Hemley to Locsin to Quezon and all they’ve called to arms in the real world and here on cyberspace, from Facebook to Twitter— you know who you are, We did it! We actually did it! Wow! You can read it on Business Mirror (thanks @bigenya for the heads up!), Palace revisits ‘Book Blockade’ after drawing flak from UN or the Philippine Star: Taxes on Imported Books, lifted. And of course, @mlq3 has updated The Great Book Blockade of 2009 Timeline.

Victory is sweet. Who would have thought we could change Government’s mind?

The sad part of it, as much of our people care more about Kho’s, Belo’s and Halili’s sex life. We won this victory without 95% of our people understanding why it was fought in the first place and why this is important. We fought this battle largely without network television and hardly any support from the daily newspapers. Heck, I don’t think they know it was fought at all.

The frightening and dangerous thought is that if this was won largely without popular support, in the next engagement, should we bother getting them onboard? That to build this nation, do we still need them? Are they immaterial to the larger war? Dangerous question, correct?

People saw the book blockade, this war on book taxes and duties as a war of the elite. How many people who joined this crusade who are actually multimillionaires but instead are ordinary people, living ordinary lives who love books?

If today’s Filipino is hardly a reader, what more when the bar to reading is higher? Literature isn’t just fiction. It includes nonfiction work. It includes poetry and essays. Literature is an important building block that goes well with music, with art, with faith. That’s an important reason to fight for this, correct? But that’s not biggest picture in this battle.

People rave time and time again that  the rule of law should be upheld. People did when Martin Nievera sang so badly. The rule of law must be upheld! Where were you when this government was trampling upon the rule of law?

People would yell at the top of their lungs that we should fight corruption. We have all these political scandals and we have people like Samuel Ong, Jun Lozada and others who fight passionately for what they believed in. Yet, for all the power and all the effort and all the anger against corruption, there is hardly anything to show for it. And we the people are so frustrated. Why is our country so fucked up?

This battle was won largely because the diverse group used cyberspace to get our message across. We were heard in the halls of the US Embassy. We were heard in twitter and facebook. We were heard in the UN. And those entities helped put in pressure on our government who would normally wait for the storm to pass.

The Internet isn’t just a delivery mechanism for sex scandals. It is a delivery mechanism to help change the world.

This is how nation building works, one pebble at a time to change a corrupt system. To put it simply, “small victories”. And to those people who failed to join this crusade or failed to see the big picture? This is what I have to say: breaking the blockade, We fought corruption and we stuck it where it hurt. What did you do the past week?

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