[Newspoint] How to stay awake

2025 may well have been the year of our rudest awakening, the year we were roused to the ultimate challenge to our values as a people.

That challenge sprang from revelations of corruption on a scale unseen before — it was perpetrated by conspiracy across government departments and institutions.

I imagine cases being cited to dispute my sweeping claim. In fact, two cases in particular, which also happened to be closely connected, might easily come to mind, given their deep and lasting impact on the nation’s life. One was the imposition of Martial Law by Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1972, and the other, the assassination of his archrival, Benigno Aquino Jr., in 1983. 

So, let me put my claim in context: a “rudest awakening” to an “ultimate challenge” — by that, I mean a jolting out of one’s sheepish sense of passivity so forceful and so ominous it should have left one no choice but to rise in revolt — or perish in one’s sleep. Neither Martial Law nor Ninoy’s assassination fit the context. Both eventualities somehow had been foretold, thus lacking the power of surprise, the power to jolt, their corrosive consequence occurring by attrition.

Martial Law was even widely accepted in the beginning as a prescription worth trying for a nation pulled in different directions by ideological and political forces. It dragged on for 14 years and ended with the dictator and his family escaping with $10 billion of the people’s money — that’s about P200 billion at the time. Not to mention, an heir to that plunder is now the sitting President — Ferdinand Jr.

In Ninoy’s case, he had come home from exile amid threats to his life. Any revolutionary emotions that might have been stirred up were overwhelmed by grief and a heightened sense of despondency. In fact, it had taken all of two and a half years before vengeance for the assassination was taken. And, even so, vengeance was taken only incidentally; it was subsumed in the popular rising that deposed Marcos, itself undertaken in fortuitous circumstances: taking a cue from a prematurely uncovered military coup, people poured out onto the streets in great masses to protect the plotters and mount a bloodless but successful revolt of their own.

The case from the year just past was nothing like those two earlier ones, particularly in immediate consequence. But that is not to say, either, that those crimes are irrelevant to the issue at hand. They are antecedent crimes; we have come to where we are today precisely because we failed to punish such crimes. Indeed, what I’m saying is that if we continued to default in that way, if this latest case were not resolved decisively, our nation would be plunged into terminal bankruptcy, not only morally but economically. 

The amounts involved in the present case alone are jolting enough — in the trillions. For an imaginable illustration: if you had a trillion pesos and spent a million a day, it would take 2,700 years to spend it all. Indeed, trillion is a unit of peso measurement unheard of until recent years, when the national budget crossed over from the billions into, to be specific, P1.2 trillion, in 2008. But that was money intended for the government to spend serving a nation of 91 million — the current budget and population are P6.8 trillion and 112 million people, respectively.

In any case, the trillions we are now talking about are not money spent for us but money stolen from us. The estimate is P8.8 trillion, totaled up from 2016, when corruption is suspected to have begun being entrenched as a cross-institutional crime. But, I guess, for pragmatic purposes — that is, putting in jail enough chief crooks, in particular the official enablers, and recovering enough of the stolen money to calm an outraged public — the investigation and prosecution are confined within one area: flood control. 

Flood control corruption became exposed amid last year’s inordinately long, stormy, and pluvial season. Floodwaters ran ever deeper and fiercer where they flowed, and stayed ever longer where they were basined. The obvious reason was that there was no flood control, and the reason there was none was that up to 70% of the money for it had been pocketed by coconspirators in Congress, the Department of Public Works and Highways, among other executive departments; the Commission on Audit, and government contractors. 

Under pressure from civil society, the church, and the public at large, the investigators and prosecutors have managed to send some accused to jail, but only to be detained before and during their trial, and to get others to return some of their loot. But that’s not even a drop in the bucket of retribution and restitution a nation robbed blind, thus condemned to poverty, in the least deserves.

Meanwhile, most of the big crooks, particularly those who had the power to lick the conspiracy, but chose to join it, remain scarcely touched, if at all. I think I know what they’re thinking: the culture has been so long damaged that it can only work for the likes of them. And so, expect them to run and hide and stall and bribe until a suitable deal is struck, a deal that cuts their winnings, not their losses, for they have lost nothing, after all. 

In other words, justice lies not with the culture but with the counterculture. It lies with the moral forces that are prepared not only to stand their ground, but also to take the fight to necessary lengths. Being jolted awake is only the first requirement; the next is staying awake. And we all know only too well ourselves how easily and quickly we manage to go back to sleep and stay asleep through the worst of times. It’s an escapist habit.

I remember feeling gratified in the first few months of the fight, before the Christmas air began to blow. Every Sunday at church, I joined an army that made for a sea of white shirts, signifying our pact and conviction. We are down to a sprinkling. – Rappler.com