27 years after Edsa: We need a new revolution

For our special presentation on our talk show, Straight from the Sky, we bring you a very interesting story of a businessman-turned-priest. In all my nearly 13 years on this show, I have never met such a man, who was a pillar in his industry… but left it to join the priesthood. This man is Fr. Ricky Ordoñez, the son of our dear friends, Mr. Del and Marilou Ordoñez of Delmar Travel, that is celebrating its 35th year in the Travel Industry. When he was still young, he wanted to join the priesthood, but that had to wait because of the business.

Fr. Ricky was sent to Manila to run Delmar Travel’s Manila office and in the years in the travel business, he was even elected as President of the Philippine Travel Association (PTA). When Delmar Travel began offering pilgrimages to the Holy Land and apparition sites, it was in one of these pilgrimages that Fr. Ricky felt God’s call… and this time, he would answer that call. But he had a problem… he was already overage.

But by a stroke of luck, he met a friend who told him that in the United States, they accepted middle-aged men for the priesthood as a way to increase vocations. Thus Fr. Ricky went to Tucson, Arizona where he is the Chaplain for Vocations today. Yes, those of you who have heard God’s call, it is not too late for you to join the priesthood. Just call Marilou Ordoñez who will give you her son’s email address. So watch this very interesting show about a businessman who joined the priesthood on SkyCable’s channel 61 at 8:00pm and on MyTV channel on M-W-F.

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I can’t believe that time has moved so fast… it’s 27 years already since the EDSA People Power Revolt removed the well-entrenched Marcos dictatorship. 14 years earlier, Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos morphed from being a democratically elected President of the Philippines to become a dictator in the fashion of most dictators living in that era…like Idi Amin of Uganda, Moammar Khadafy of Libya, Park Chung Hee of South Korea, etc. etc.

For 14 years Filipinos lived in a nation ruled by the so-called conjugal dictatorship and we showed the resilience of the Filipino people. But as the old saying goes; “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely!” In hindsight, if only Pres. Marcos listened to the cries of the nation to restore democracy, things would have augured well for the Philippines… and we would never have become the talk of Asia… as the Sick Man of Asia.

But 27 years ago…the EDSA People Power revolt removed from power Ali Baba and his forty thieves. We replaced him with the saintly Tita Cory Aquino who did not want to wield political power. But instead of fixing the things that needed fixing in this country…like the need to speed up the delivery of our justice system… like the removal of red tape that makes our bureaucracy corrupt or the removal of political dynasties. Tita Cory instead created a new constitution, named after her where it retained the highly-centralized form of government, which is why development in the Philippines is still very imbalanced. While Ali Baba was gone, the forty thieves returned and brought their cronies with them.

27 years ago should also remind us, especially those young ones who were not yet born in Feb. 1986, Pres. Marcos called for a “Snap elections” and while the counting was underway… the computer technicians conducted a massive walkout from their headquarters at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) because they were fed up of the cheating by the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL), which then triggered a nationwide protest that culminated in the EDSA Revolt.

Remember the old saying, “Those who forget their history is doomed to repeat them?” I just hope that come May 2013 elections… the Liberal Party (LP) would remember that the Filipino people would not accept any massive cheating in the counting. But will history repeat itself? For our nation’s sake, I hope not! But with the Comelec’s intransigence in insisting in the use of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) even if they have no licensed source code and with less than three months left until the May 2013 elections… a similar scenario could just be in the offing.

27 years after the EDSA Revolt, the Philippines continue to wallow on the same problems it never cared to solve. We’ve been lured by glib tongued politicians who uses the name of the poor people in vain, but whose main objective is to get their dirty hands on the pork barrel paid for by our tax money. This is why today, the Filipino voter seem helpless that there’s not much choice with the Liberal Party or the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) and they are right… what we need is not another useless elections, but a systems change. What we need is another revolution that should usher a real and genuine change, unlike today which is much of the same thing.

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