The truth is finally emerging

No two people are the same. There are those who see things one way, and those who see it the other. The beauty of democracy is that it provides the space and the opportunity for both to flower and flourish.

Those who truly value democracy and not just pay it lip service welcome and insist on this co-existence as a better proposition than submitting to the dictates of one side. Maturity is measured by the capacity and willingness of one to hear the other with respect, not rancor.  

Yet those who are for Noynoy Aquino are branding those against him as trapos, morons and paid hacks. What a big disappointment. One would have expected that a camp that claims to occupy the high moral ground would rise above petty peevishness and not resort to name-calling.

 The seriousness of the charges raised against the Arroyo government make it imperative that the next president should be somebody capable of steering this country back on the right track. Capability is the one issue that begs for a truly informed debate.

 So, to encourage such a debate, those who believe Noynoy does not have that capability have laid on the table the reasons why they think that way. But instead of picking up the issues, the Noynoy fans not only ignore them, they even resort to name-calling.

 But that is not all. Noynoy himself, for all the aura of moral uprightness and saintliness his coddlers have painted around him, has done absolutely nothing to stop his people from engaging in this kind of dirty, lowdown, campaign strategy.

 The main selling point of Noynoy is that he is supposedly blessed by the saintly genes of his mother and the intellectual genes of his father. His camp believes these qualifications are enough basis for Filipinos to elect him president.

 But there are those who do not see it that way. There are those who do not believe having a good father and a good mother are enough confidence-boosters to entrust him the difficult task of leading the country for the next six years.

 But instead of engaging in a debate on this issue, debating being a healthy and essential part of the democracy that his own mother helped restore in 1986, and his own father died for in 1983, the supporters of Noynoy would rather resort to a pathetic escapist game of name-calling.

 Trapos? Morons? Paid hacks? And what do you call those who defend Noynoy by resorting to name-calling instead of engaging in a healthy debate on real issues? Are they not the real and bigger trapos, morons, and paid hacks?

Yet again I issue this challenge as I have done many times since the country launched itself into an election mode: Will any person who ever considered Noynoy Aquino as a presidential timber prior to the death of Cory Aquino please stand up and be recognized?

 I do not think anybody in his right mind ever gave Noynoy a thought before Cory died. The Liberal Party itself was all out for Mar Roxas, until the Cory phenomenon made it clear that it can be exploited for political interests using Noynoy as the hapless implement.

 And so, survey after survey showed Noynoy soaring to unimaginable heights, heights that simply do not jibe with the person that Noynoy is. That is until the people started getting back their wits over time.

 That is why, in the last two surveys, one by the Social Weather Stations and the other by the Manila Standard, the ratings of Noynoy were shown to have drastically slipped so that only about eight or seven points separate him from Manny Villar, the survey leader before Cory died.

 This should be a happy development for the nation, that people who used to be swayed by emotions have come to their senses and exposed those — including trapos, morons and paid hacks — who are only using Noynoy for their own political interests.