‘Bottomline, no one political faction can claim to be the epitome of moral and ethical leadership unless they are half blind or have some selective amnesia.’
ONCE in a while I still hear snippets of conversations about Ping Lacson, Tito Sotto, and even Dick Gordon from people who do not seem inclined to be voting for them. These are usually the yellows-turned-pink, and their main objection is that at one point in time Lacson, Sotto, and Gordon were enablers of the Duterte administration.
Enablers! Hell will have to freeze over first before they could even imagine voting for these types.
Such comments leave me with mixed emotions. Amusement, irritation, sometimes even anger. And yes, sometimes pity as well — pity at the realization that many of our countrymen, even among the so-called ABC crowd, know little about our political history.
Or perhaps have a selective memory.
Ours is a nation of enablers and history shows that we just love forgiving enablers — or at least those we like, such as relatives and friends.
The rest we condemn to hell.
Our colonial history proves it. While other people made sure that locals who enabled the colonial powers were killed or run out of town for treason, we Filipinos hailed them and rewarded them for their actions. Heck, we even kept celebrating the very religious orders that, if you truly are a good student of Rizal, you should know helped cause the massive poverty in the countryside because they displaced our kababayans by grabbing their land and creating friar estates.
We celebrate those who collaborated with the Spaniards. We did the same with those who collaborated with the Americans and then the Japanese. In contrast, in countries like France, those who collaborated with the Nazis had to flee for their lives.
Speaking of the Japanese collaborators, need I name them? Maybe the roster of the founders of one of our oldest political parties will provide the answers Marcos cronies deserve a special place in hell in the eyes of those who celebrate EDSA 1986 as a revolution and not as a restoration. But some of those who were at the forefront of the anti-Marcos rallies became enablers themselves of succeeding administrations.
In 2004, for example, PGMA was accused of having stolen the elections from Fernando Poe Jr. Who enabled the steal? The canvassers, yes, who only “noted” the objections of the opposition in the same way the Marcos allies in the Batasan placed “asterisks” on the questioned returns. One of today’s opposition stalwarts even boasted in 2003 that PGMA could always come back to Iloilo where she was loved if protests in NCR became too much for her.
Enablers of a steal then, forgotten and forgiven today?
Bottomline, no one political faction can claim to be the epitome of moral and ethical leadership unless they are half blind or have some selective amnesia. And it doesn’t help one’s cause when one climbs up on one’s high horse to not only preach but to condemn those who think differently. But this being the political season we see a lot of that and will have to suffer through about a month more.
Enablers? Hehe. It seems we all are.
