Fighting back August 29, 2006

DON'T look now, but the derailed train called "Cha-cha" [Charter change] is careening down the path of sleeping residents of homes along "da riles" [the railroad tracks]. It's the latest in a long list of oppression that in the last few months alone has included: The refusal by Malacañang to obey the Supreme Court ruling scrapping Executive Order 464, the "calibrated preemptive response" policy on protest rallies, and Presidential Proclamation 1017 (to this day, officials summoned by the Senate routinely ignore it; to this day, rallies are prevented or scuttled; and to this day, democracy remains comatose); the "killing fields" courtesy of Jovito Palparan and like-minded generals; and Congress' summary execution of the impeachment bid against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Now, it's Cha-cha.

One Voice says it's ready to do battle with it. As indeed other groups and individuals who are preparing their briefs to present before the courts, the legislative bodies and the public in talk shows. I am not unsympathetic to the cause. I do think people ought to stand up and take notice, and fight this oppression with fire in their bellies and anger in their hearts.

There's no comfort to be taken from the fact that Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chair Benjamin Abalos says he won't act on Sigaw ng Bayan's petition to change the Charter in view of the Supreme Court's injunction against it, the petition having no enabling law. Neither the law nor the Supreme Court has stopped this government from doing what it wants. And Abalos himself has yet to appreciate the meaning of the phrase "full force of the law." He has presided over a Comelec that screwed a decade of effort to computerize canvassing by giving the winning bid to an unqualified bidder, and he hasn't been punished for it.

I do think we ought to "do battle" with Cha-cha, but I don't think that merely opposing Cha-cha is the way to do it. There is no end of ways to do battle, and I think a purely defensive posture is the least effective of them -- if indeed it is effective at all. As the impeachment bid shows, having the truth on your side means nothing if you are fighting the enemy on his turf. You want to fight back, think offensive. You want to fight back, take the battle to your turf.

My own tack is this: In lieu of just mustering arguments against the Cha-cha and taking it on in various forums, launch your own signature campaign for a movement. The only way to fight a bad idea is through a good idea. My suggestion remains a campaign called: "Snap Gloria." The "Snap" there meaning "Say No to A Phony," and the call being for snap elections. A signature campaign for something like this has several advantages.

First, it will show up the lie in the name "Sigaw ng Bayan," which the people demanding Charter change have seen fit to appropriate. The only real "sigaw ng bayan," or cry of the people, you will hear in this country is for Gloria to go away. You see that in surveys, you hear that in conversations. There is no cry for the presidential system to disappear from the nation's life, but there is a cry for Gloria to disappear from the people's lives. If the Cha-cha people can launch a signature campaign that says the sun revolves around the earth, I don't see why we can't launch a signature campaign that says the earth revolves around the sun. Like I said before, I am confident a campaign to "snap Gloria" will get more signatures in one week than the Cha-cha got in one year. Launch a campaign like this, and you will have more people lining up in your booths than before health centers distributing condoms. Some protections are better than others.

Second, it draws attention to the heart of the matter, something we may not allow this nation to forget. Which is the problem of an illegitimate president, which is the problem of an illegitimate rule. I do think the people who tried to impeach Gloria for a second time made the mistake of enumerating too many issues against her. One would have sufficed: She stole the vote. Everything comes back to that, everything owes to that. A signature campaign to snap Gloria brings that back into focus. And it ranges itself directly against the Cha-cha: The Charter is genuine, the president is fake. Change the usurper, not the Charter. That is the slogan the campaign should carry.

And third, it gives the public something to do. Opposing Cha-cha merely turns the citizens into spectators of a not very genteel sport invented by their "betters." A signature campaign to snap Gloria gives them the opportunity to fight back. Nothing is more frustrating than immobility and a sense of powerlessness. It gives way to cynicism, indifference, or – as the survey shows -- a desperate desire to flee this country and live elsewhere. The citizens need to be able to fight back. The citizens need to have a way to fight back.

The likely objection to this is that it will run against all sorts of legal tangles. There is no enabling law that says the citizens may compel snap elections by universal, or near-universal, acclamation. My answer to that is this:

At the very least, there is no enabling law either to allow a "people's initiative" to change the form of government, but that hasn't prevented Joe de V and company from attempting it. And clearly what they have is not a people's initiative, what they have is a personal initiative. Why can't a genuine people's initiative be mounted to change what truly ought to be changed?

At the very most, what is law really in its essence? Last I looked, in a democracy the people did not emanate from the law, the law emanated from the people. It was the people exercising their sovereign will that made the law and not the law playing with itself that made sovereign will. Lest we forget, Gloria was made president completely lawfully by an act of sovereign will.

She can be unmade completely lawfully by an act of sovereign will.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=17735