[Newspoint] Re-situating People Power

In its first, and successful, staging, People Power was defined by a million citizens massing on the nation’s premier highway, EDSA, and keeping vigil to oust a dictator by peaceful protest. That was four decades ago, but, with the increasingly quickened pace of life since, it may seem not so long ago to those who took part in it. 

To those born too late to have a conscious memory of it, on the other hand, People Power is of another world. Thanks, moreover, to a technology that allows their generation to live comfortably, risk-free, if virtually, in a world of their own, its legacy has gone unappreciated. And since the technology is here to stay, and continues to evolve, inexorably, blaming it is useless, in fact defeatist. 

The default squarely lies with us, the EDSA generation, for failing to redefine and re-situate People Power for the next generations. Or are we ourselves groping for a rational grasp of People Power? 

It was nothing planned, for one thing. It was more of a fluke or, if you like, some stroke of fate: a prematurely uncovered coup against the dictator provides a rallying point for the protest; Manila’s activist archbishop raises a call to civic action, and the call carries across, and is obeyed, like some heavenly command; and, to put an end to the standoff, the United States withdraws its patronage of the dictator, actually surrenders for him, and flies him away to exile.

In any case, People Power does not have to be an EDSA, with a million of us finding ourselves pouring out onto the streets guided by some unseen shepherding hand. People Power is about speaking truth, and taking the fight for it, to power. It can be a protest mounted by separate bands sprouting on various fronts, including online platforms, so long as they pursue a common cause.

I do observe protests undertaken that way, and they strike me as not unlike guerrilla warfare, which has suited our temperament and capacities as a fighting nation scattered across seven thousand islands. But, as it is deployed now, the tactic seems to me weakened by too little risk-taking and confused objectives.

Obviously for now, no concern supersedes that of getting the impeachment trial of Sara Duterte mounted and going without delay — “forthwith,” as the Constitution itself commands. It is, after all, a process intended for an emergency — to stop an official potentially causing further grave danger to the nation. 

In fact, Duterte’s case raises a particular alarm. Apart from allegations of grand embezzlement, in hundreds of millions of taxpayer pesos, she is being brought to trial for her own proud and repeated admission of hiring an assassin to kill the president, gangland-style. And rounding out the brazenness of the plot is the self-serving setup —  certainly constitutional though only applicable in a natural turn of events — in which the vice president, in this case a potential grand embezzler and murderer, takes over upon the president’s incapacity.

Further alarm is raised by every indication that the Senate’s new majority, which took over in a coup just before the Senate could reconstitute itself into an impeachment court, is out to manipulate the trial in order to get Duterte off. That makes the Senate the main front for protest. 

Led by hardcore holdouts from Duterte’s father’s presidency, those senators, with increasing desperation, have been fighting arrangements that can relegate them to the minority, any political minority, especially arrangements that could result in accountability being exacted for wrongdoing any of them may have managed to get away with under Rodrigo Duterte’s regime or residual influence. Nothing less than a real prospect of retributive justice will get their serious attention — arrest, detention, trial. 

The Ombudsman and the Department of Justice appear doing their part to move things in that direction. The courts, on their part, are looking more independent-minded than they were under Rodrigo Duterte’s transactional and intimidating, virtually autocratic, rule. 

So, where does civic action fall in this scheme of things? Its place is in fact simple and traditional, but, the idea being to make a People Power point, it had better be delivered boldly, dramatically. Conscience-pricking for the likes of Alan Peter Cayetano and Joel Villanueva in particular is as much a joke as they are themselves a joke, being such self-styled moralists.

History offers potent alternatives. Even in Rome’s experiment with representative republic, citizens threw projectiles at politicians — stones, bricks, roof tiles — although it may well have been a mobbish rebound from their all-too-recent ruthless imperial past. A more suitable model would be a practice in Europe from the medieval through the modern times. It weaponizes instead vegetables and fruits just as rotten as their targets. Nothing of the sort has been attempted against our own perfectly deserving Senate, not even if all the risk involved is arrest for littering. 

So much for People Power. – Rappler.com