Blindness is tragic
Except for Gary Alejano, who tries hard unsuccessfully to swap a mutinous past with a self-righteous present, and Mar Roxas, who would try just about anything for political gain, the rest of the opposition Otso Deretso senatorial team appear to be a somewhat decent if tragic lot.
Tragic because, one, they are all blind, and two, they lag way behind in practically all relevant and credible surveys as a consequence of that blindness. But even more tragic is the fact that their blindness is not something they cannot overcome or get out of. It was never foisted on them. They inflicted it on their own selves, by their own hands, and of their own choosing.
To a man, and woman, the Otso Deretso team elected to make Marcos and martial law their singular working platform, 33 years after Marcos was ousted in a bloodless popular uprising, and 38 years after martial law's official lifting. The country has moved forward since then. Maybe not to the best of expectations, but forward nevertheless.
Not only is the blindness of Otso Deretso to contemporary facts and realities tragic, it is also pathetic. Nothing is more sad and pitiful than the sight of grown men clinging obstinately to the old and comfortable despite the obvious fact that old results are not coming anymore, that time and new circumstances have overtaken the jaded narrative, as they always must.
Somebody should tell Otso Deretso their grieving over lost freedoms, and fears of losing again what little freedoms they must grudgingly concede to the present, all fall flat in face of a reality they refuse to acknowledge. How can they sustain a narrative that gets cut underneath by evidence they themselves cannot argue against?
Look, the entire Otso Deretso team subscribes to the Aquino political myth, whereby everything Marcos is evil and everything Aquino is good. But haven't Filipinos had two Aquino presidents since Marcos? Surely two Aquinos must be enough to erase all the evil that came with Marcos.
But of course Otso Deretso would never dare bring up the fact that the Philippines already had two Aquino presidents since Marcos and martial law. If they do, and at the same time keep up their belly-aching about lost or fragile freedoms, then they would only expose the vulnerability of the Aquino myth and bring forth the fact that the two Aquino presidencies were failures.
And if the two Aquino presidencies were abject failures, then that can only mean one thing --that it is the two Aquinos who are to blame for our weak institutions, as claimed no end by Otso Deretso, and not Marcos who has long gone, or even Duterte for that matter, who has just come. But of course only Otso Deretso is blind. That is why it is groping behind the rest of us.
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