The Philippines' second republic will celebrate its 64th birthday this year. When I reflected upon our nation's coming birthday, I was reminded of lyrics in one of the enduring Beatles' songs:
Will you still need me,
Will you still feed me
when I'm 64?
This is the question that our republic has asked us Filipinos for sometime now, and on its 64th birthday, perhaps it deserves an answer from the people.
Whether we will continue to need or want the Philippine Republic on its 64th birthday will depend a lot on what happens in the elections of 2010.
If the candidates with clear leads in the polls in the weeks leading up to the elections actually win, we could conclude as a people that at least in one instance, our electoral system worked. Elections shall not have been stolen, those widely expected to win shall have actually won.
It will depend a lot on the outcome of the elections but not entirely. There will still be the question of what the victors actually do or try to accomplish once in office. There will still be the question of what the Commission on Elections does with regards to election protests, recounts, etc.
Even if the main elections - Presidential and senatorial - are not stolen, will there be questions on the legitimacy of outcomes in the congressional and local government races? Will Gloria really beat Randy David? Will the Dys succeed in preventing Grace Padaca from winning back her governor's seat?
Whether Philippine elections - at the local and national levels - are judged ultimately fair and democratic will determine whether we will still need this second Philippine Republic.
The Iranian people are sending Filipinos a clear signal: every vote is precious, more precious than human life. Iranians are willing to die to defend the sanctity of their ballots. Iranians know that they elected their hero, Mir Hossein Mousavi, President in the Iranian elections last summer. Yet, incredibly, the incumbent President who many Iranians consider a dunce unworthy of the presidency, Ahmadinejad, emerged as the winner. The Iranians know that the election was stolen because in the major strongholds of the opposition, Mousavi got far less votes than Ahmadinejad.
If the Philippine elections are stolen, will Filipinos react the same way? Will there be another EDSA that will topple not only the current and emerging leadership but also finally demolish the second Republic?
Is there sufficient pent-up anger and disappointment in the Philippines that shall result in a major volcanic eruption that will bury the second Republic in lava, ash and mud and confine it to the silent pages of our history?
The Iranians are poised to do this. The bells are tolling for the religious constitutional monarchy installed in Iran after the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s. The system they will replace the Ayatollahs with, from all appearances, will approximate the European model. It probably will be a parliamentary system with a strong Prime Minister. That, after all, was the system that the Iranians had during the monarchical rule of the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who eventually seized the government and ruled as a brutal and murderous dictator from 1953 to 1978.
The Iranians will insist on a democracy similar to what we have in the U.S., but the system they will install will probably be closer to the British model. The late Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who as Prime Minister from 1951-53 nationalized the Iranian oil industry and made enemies out of Britain and the U.S., nevertheless tried to install U.S. style freedoms and for that became a beloved figure to the Iranians.
Though the Iranians have never known a democratic system of government, they did experience personal freedoms during the brief stint of Dr. Mossadegh as Prime Minister. The memory of that brief sunshine in their history is probably what is keeping them focused on the overthrow of the Ayatollahs.
If Filipinos finally rebel against the rapacious greed and lust for power of the ruling elite and through another EDSA succeed in an extra-constitutional change in government, it must be a real change. Not a change in the members of the cast, but a change in the system, a change in the dynamics of the players, a change in the panorama itself.
We must not go back to the old system that does not work, that has never worked. The old system brought us leaders who bought their way, who murdered their way, who cheated their way into office. We have leaders we would not elect if we were not desperate for help in order to buy much-needed medicine for a sick child or a sick old relative.
We hold up our noses and elect certifiable crooks because those crooks have promised us government jobs and have lavished gifts to our neighborhoods in the current election season.
We elect know-nothing showbiz and sports people, jueteng lords, smugglers, convicted plunderers, 20 percenters (those who earn 20 percent commissions on government contracts), leaders of government-sponsored assassination gangs, or hit squads for short.
We know that we have entrusted our future and the future of our children - alas, our nation's future - to people who we already know will not work for the benefit of our people but rather concentrate on lining their own pockets and the pockets of the hangers-on who manage to get close to them.
And this does not faze us. It's A-OK 24/7. A recent survey, the 2009 Happy Planet Index, found that Filipinos are the 14th happiest people on earth. We endure earthquakes, typhoons, mudslides, ferry boat sinkings, mass murders of politicians and journalists such as recently in Maguindanao, extra-judicial killings of critics of the administration.
We smile through all this with the patented innocent smiles of paradise dwellers. If Gaugin were alive today, he might have gone to an island in the Visayas instead of Tahiti.
What matters that Filipinos must endure privation, hunger, permanent unemployment, subhuman living conditions when most of them are happy and contented with their lot?
Those who have owned nothing expect nothing and find happiness in their very existence. The Tasadays - albeit later proved fakes - were some of the happiest people on earth, if not the happiest.
It will be very difficult to break Filipinos' preoccupation with their everyday lives that they feel is shared with their Creator and their much-respected religious leaders. As long as their link to their God, to Virgin Mary, to their parish priests and bishops is unsevered, what else could anyone want?
The older generations are long gone. They are done. You can stick a fork in them, as sports journalists are wont to say.
The youth, those who constantly text each other and move as one - like the migrating Canadian geese in their V-formations in the autumn sky - may have other ideas. While today's establishment and elders were once the youth that started the EDSA revolution, the People Power revolution that toppled Marcos and has since been copied by peoples all around the world, today's youth is primed for the next Big EDSA.
They don't understand why they have to flee their country to find employment. They don't respect authority that has time and again proved Machiavellian and predatory. They are itching to march and scream and dump blame on someone. They want to change society.
We People Power revolutionaries of the late 80s can only look now to our children - the youth of today - to continue the job of changing our society.
They don't know, cannot know, what system of government they want to replace the second Republic with. They will look to us to show the way. They are smart enough to know that if they themselves decide on what's next, they might end up with another loser.
We know that Philippine democracy does not work. We know that communism has never worked. We know that religious constitutional monarchies - the system at work in Iran - are flawed in the extreme and susceptible to abuses of absolute power.
What system shall finally emerge from the streets after another, bigger and earth-shaking EDSA?
Think about this, and think hard. Think Fidel Castro without the communist ideology. Think the Roman triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompeii the Great and Marcus Crassus. A triumvirate of Noynoy Aquino, the top military man and an elder statesman such as Fidel Ramos can lead the country in the aftermath of the next EDSA.
Those three, with the help of the country's best minds and most admired youth leaders, shall blaze the trail towards a new system that will actually work.
If there's massive cheating in the 2010 elections, if there's a paralyzing breakdown in the new computerized voting system thereby rendering the elections null and void, which would perpetuate the Arroyos in power, the Filipino youth will probably take to the streets.
And this time they will insist on real changes.
