EDITORIAL - Even protests fall out of fashion

Ever since street demonstrations became fashionable in this country, starting at around the time of Ferdinand Marcos, no Philippine president has been spared the dogged persistence of these protesters.

Street protests started legitimately enough. They were undertaken on behalf of issues that were real, immediate, and with far-ranging implications on the lives of the vast majority of Filipinos.

But ever since Marcos fell from power, it became increasingly clear that street protests have gone to either or both of only two directions: The ideology-fed movement going to the left and on to communism, and the protest-spawned profession leading off to a source of livelihood.

Oddly, it is sometimes hard to tell the two apart. But there is no mistaking the leftist character of the most virulent protests — no sitting leader is good enough for them, and every sitting leader is always guilty of the same pro-US, pro-capitalist crimes.

Last Monday, when President Aquino delivered his second State of the Nation Address, the streets around the Batasan Pambansa were once again filled with this kind of protesters, all mumbling the same jaded lines.

And they are very resourceful, their resourcefulness reflective of the kind of budget they enjoy from their foreign funding sources. While before they painted Gloria Arroyo as a buck toothed midget, now they have depicted Aquino as an egg, a take on his preferred monicker Pnoy.

But other than their presence in the streets, and their unreasonable demand to break through security lines, there are hardly any new takers of their contrived causes, other than of course the naive and the gullible. Even Noynoy-bashers resent the nuisance posed by protesters.

Their numbers are diminishing. And what numbers there are that remain, they are diluted by those who are in it only for reasons far removed from the causes they try hard to sound really serious about.

Of course there are those who honestly believe in the causes they espouse. But the modes of protest have changed. Worse, there are causes that, while they remain valid, no longer require resolution by political means. The world has moved on. Some issues have been overtaken by time.