The Choices We Make

They say our future is decided by the choices we make.

My father just like his grandfather chose someone to live his life with and raise a family and the rest is history. Then, there was me, my wife and my kids and what will probably be a whole lifetime of choices.

I chose to marry and have a wife instead of the original path I wanted for myself which is to eliminate a whole generation of bad choices. The choice I made will leave a society today that my children will have to live with. A society bred by a government that is not accountable to anyone and a population of Filipinos still unable to make the government accountable.

Look at the kind of life we have decided for ourselves today. We see law enforcers shooting suspected "car jackers" in cold blood on national television and nobody is shock. We witness and hear a Commission on Election officer lie to his teeth on prime time and made all of us look like a country of fools and we still are not angry. We can't get murderers arrested but we can have a fragile and retired military general arrested for merely insinuating that change in government is necessary.

How can you protect yourself against your own government? It has clearly demonstrated that your vote, your rights, your voice, your choices and even your life is not worth anything. If your not scared by the prospect that you can just be shot by anyone in government on national television and be branded a terrorist, a car jacker, a drug dealer, a subversive or a snatcher after a "legitimate" operation based on a "textbook" rules of engagement then you deserve to be shot. I certainly don't want my son and daughter to see my bullet-ridden body and read about me as a "suspected terrorist" shot in an encounter with a SWAT team. Even you would not like that specially when what actually happened was you were waving a number 10 stapler menacingly in a checkpoint filled with hoodlums pointing high-powered guns at you.

The present government thinks that they have something to fear in the ostentatious display of defiance by a few well-funded group of people representing themselves as "civil society". They worry about the eloquent speeches of disgruntled former cabinet members and old politicians succumbing to the flatulence of their own self-proclaimed status of being the "national conscience".

What they have to really fear more is the apathy that is growing among the greater number of the population? The population that no longer cares. The population that will choose to look the other way. I personally am exhausted at the existing avenues for redress and to think I know well both the easy and the hard way to get redress.

Imagine the kind of fatigue that majority go through everyday. The majority who either cannot afford the avenues for redress or have no knowledge that such avenues exist. I can still feel and remember the rage seething in my mind and in my heart in my own personal experience when government has failed me. Try to mathematically approximate the intensity of this rage if more than 60% of our population goes through pain of either being abused by representatives and officers of government or simply being ignored. All that plus the life of living with poverty every single day. This simply is like gunpowder in a keg, pressurized molten lava in a volcano or a nuclear chain reaction waiting to happen.

Whoever will have grand plan to bring a change in government or in society as a whole will succeed if a viable platform is presented, a new ideology is advocated, a leader emerges as an embodiment of that ideology, an infrastructure to deliver the ideology, and a resolve to eliminate the old values.

Communism has failed and socialism is not getting any sweeter. Democracy in this country has failed even its loyal adherents and religion ceases to be a refuge. Your spiritual adviser is himself either lost or confuse, a bigot, a fanatical extremist, a pedophile, or can't seem to make up his mind if he is a man or a woman and add to that have serious issues about getting married.

The new ideology if it has promise and when it does come will have no defiant adversary but the government. When the army of the new ideology marches on the street it will not necessarily get support from the population but the population will not be too eager either to put their lives on the line to defend the ideals of democracy or any fashionable version of it.

The followers of the new ideology will just march on and raise their flags and announce a new social order has arrived. This social order will not forgive those who participated in the old one. Many in government will go to prison, some will probably get shot in their offices and others will simply disappear.

This social order will be unlike any since it will only deal with government.

You might ask yourself, will this not trigger a national outcry? Did it trigger an outcry when millions of money is unaccounted for by a Catholic priest? Did it trigger an outcry that the impeachment trial of a president was never finished? Did it trigger an outcry when young men on national television are shot defenseless? Did it trigger an outcry when legislators boldly announce that they will not submit to any ethical standards? Did it trigger a national outcry when time and again public officials lie on national television? Ask yourself that and then think again!

Think about this: A sniper is more than a hundred yards from its target across a mass of people in between. He is not carrying an M-14 rifle with night and thermal scope. He is carrying a hit seeking guided Stinger missile launcher and he is just there with a mass of people between him and the target. He doesn't hide or wear camouflage. He takes a bull horn and shouts: "Hello excuse me your blocking my sights. Can you please take one step back?" People will probably look at the sniper and then look at the other side to know who is the target and take five steps back. Today, many will consider government as a legitimate target for almost anything for many legitimate reasons. Creating an atmosphere of apathy provides the right conditions for motivating people to take a few steps back to give anyone a clear shot.

There will be a lot of takers. Take your pick! You can have the Bangsa Moro, the NDF, Abu Sayyaf, Jemal Islamiyah, Cory Aquino, Loren Legarda, Boy Abunda but most of all it provides a strong motivation and a clear shot for a well-motivated group with a legitimate agenda for a new order driven by a lot less confusing ideology.

I'm not sure how this will be played out because the government is either paranoid or in denial. It cannot provide a decent way to redeem itself. Lies are becoming a policy and obfuscation obviously is becoming a virtue. And as if conning a whole nation is not enough another Constitutional Convention will now legitimize the term of what many consider a questionable presidency. Apparently our esteemed Constitutionalists believe that this country will be in better hands if the same people in government will be given a chance to govern under a parliamentary system.

This kind of thinking is like a Catholic Priest assuming that his virgin daughter will not be raped and killed if he sends her naked to Satan's bedroom on the condition that Satan converts to Buddhism. Of course, Satan will become a Buddhist, probably burn lots of incense then chops the virgin daughter to pieces after he sodomize her. But why be so gruesome? It's just another Constitution, another form of government and another lost election.

Anyway, our Commission on Election will probably guarantee that the next election in 2010 will be "trouble-free" and abides by the new constitution and the parliamentary system. The Comelec had always abided by the Constitution. We can rely on our Comelec to be really just a call away in its new anti-tapping anti-surveillance shielded PABX system. Hello Garci...

With the way election works in this country, a peaceful transition is a trip to the Yellow Brick Road! Change is eminent and it will be grotesque to many in government.

Change will be rapid cutting across the executive and the legislature first and then moving on to the judiciary. The most corrupt government agencies will probably believe that the new order will be just like any political change and think their hidden wealth will guarantee their safety. They will fall helpless victim to the system of abuse and corruption they have created. Along with hundreds of thousands of their colleagues they will find themselves locked in a dark foul-smelling abyss--well-documented, their fate sealed and forgotten.

Apathy will ensure the takeover of the new ideology will be painless for the general population. The only critical decision that the Filipino nation will make is a choice of either finishing the latest news about the new social order or watching the first episode of the fifth season of "Pinoy Big Brother".

The only funny thing that will confuse the nation's decision is if Manny Pacquiao schedules his last world championship fight on that same day.

The choices that will be available to the leaders of the new order is to spare the lives of those who nurtured the old political system and allow a rough road towards complete transformation or erase all vestiges of that system and start fresh simply because it is efficient, economical and logical.

In my life, I always believe that I have only two choices: What is right and what is easy? For most people in societies like ours, the choices are most of the time pretty obvious and for the rest, there's always apathy.