Looking forward to a better year 2011

This is my last column for the Year 2010. I will be the first to admit that it wasn’t a good year for me, politically. However, professionally, I’d say it was a great year! For the first five months of the Year 2010, we spent it in one of the most intriguing Presidential elections that we have ever witnessed. I have always been intrigued by our Presidential elections since I first joined and campaigned for the late Senator Sergio “Serging” Osmeña Jr. My late father, Atty. Jesus “Lindong” Avila helped Serging in the 1969 Presidential campaign. You can say that we were a blue-blooded Liberal Party (LP) stalwarts, which had a profound impact in my life.

 In fact the old Avila Paternal home which now stands the new JESA IT building was used as Serging’s campaign headquarters as the house was vacant at that time. Of course that campaign ended with the loss of Serging over then Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos. The next campaign we prepared for was for the Senate race, which was marred by the infamous bombing of Plaza Miranda. Eventually, the politics in this country changed when Pres. Marcos found a convenient excuse to declare Martial Law in this country in Sept. 21, 1972.

 With the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) in place, we shied away from politics and focused on sporting activities like entering the 1st Motocross races in Cebu and we also figured in Archery competitions. We were thus elated that the Pusyon Bisaya (PB) won seats in the Philippine Assembly, led by our good friend, former Chief Justice Hilario “Jun” Davide Jr. Then in 1985, my AIM classmate Raul del Mar convinced me that we both should run for the City Council. But as events moved on, he ran for the Assembly instead. While he lost that, he eventually won a seat in Congress.

 My good friend, Atty. Raul Gonzales (who became the Ombudsman under Tita Cory and later DoJ Secretary under GMA) later convinced me to join the United Nationalists Democratic Organization (UNIDO). That put me together with then Senator and later Vice-President Salvador “Doy” Laurel. Then came Divine Providence in the form of the EDSA Revolt that brought all of us to the streets (we were at the Fuente Osmeña) rejoicing when we learned that the Marcoses had fled the country.

 There’s no doubt that the sacrifice of Doy Laurel strengthened the opposition that hurled Cory Aquino, the widow of Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. to the Presidency. But much too soon, Doy and Tita Cory parted ways and the opposition split up. Cory ended up listening to her leftist friends, where she freed the imprisoned chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) Jose Maria “Joma” Sison without any deals that would have been favorable to the Philippine government.

 Instead of calling for a Constitutional Convention (concon), which the UNIDO was pushing for, Tita Cory allowed 49 men and women to create what we now call the Cory Constitution. In the end, this is the constitution that allowed the old oligarchy that the Marcoses removed to return to power. The worse part of all, despite calling for a Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) none of the Marcos were jailed on the charges of corruption that the opposition tagged against them.

 To make matters worse, Tita Cory cancelled the nearly finished Bataan Nuclear Powered Plant (BNPP), which is why today 24 years after the EDSA Revolt, we still suffer power outages. Sure our population has grown, but our streets remain narrow and even the pedestrians have to walk along the road because sidewalk vendors have arrogated the sidewalks as if it was their right to use them. In short, the most basic things in life have been forgotten by the government in order to make life easier for our people.

 I’m sure you’re asking why I am giving our readers a political history. It is because of that saying by Barbara Tuchman, “Those who do not remember their history is doomed to repeat them.” A simple lesson in history could be a shooter firing his pistol in a target and missing it a few inches on the right. If that shooter doesn’t adjust his sights, when he fires his pistol again, the bullet would go into the same grouping as the previous bullet. Surely you don’t need a College degree in History to understand what Barbara Tuchman meant, that if we want to be on target, let’s adjust ourselves!

 The Year 2010 was a very political one. It gave us the first ever electronic election machinery, which wasn’t used in the Barangay polls. This tells us that that system wasn’t good for our national elections. While most of us await the New Year 2011 with much expectation, we must fix first the problems that we failed to solve in the past in order to move forward to a better tomorrow. We hope that in the Year 2011, we won’t see a repeat of those bungling moments done by the Aquino government, which caused so much national and international anxiety and grief.

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