Despite volumes of work on the subject of the increasingly-evident vacuousness of today’s Opposition, there seems to be little change in the substance underlying their “movement”. The best they have so far come up with is the rather quaint “Join the Resistance” call-to-action which they bandy around using the hashtag #JoinTheResistance. Dubbed an “online movement”, the activities related to this initiative consist mainly of tweeting various platitudes and attaching said hashtag.
Is anybody actually doing any thinking within the Philippine opposition? Probably not. Otherwise, there would be some observable semblance of evolution happening in that space. Instead, all we see are the same tired old fear mongering around the same old political bogeymen — the need for bread and circuses, the veneration of bygone “heroes”, and the pompous shows of piety as a means to acquire moral ascendancy for their “movement”. If the current Opposition led by the Liberal Party (a.k.a. the Yellowtards) were a mousetrap, the cheese it is using as bait would be an unrecognisable lump that’s long been blackened by a thick coat of mould. A mouse foolish enough to scurry away with it without tripping the trap would die of food poisoning anyway.
Take stock of the rhetoric being spewed by the Opposition’s foremost “thought leaders” and you will be hard-pressed to find anything that even resembles an idea pegged on the future. Instead, practically everything about the Yellowtard rhetoric is anchored in the past — the “horrors” of the “Martial Law Era” and the “glory” of the EDSA “revolution” topping the list. Every criticism or challenge to the positions taken by the incumbent administration are referenced against these historical memetic relics. There is no challenge that pertains to prospects and none that counter-argues with alternatives. Indeed, the very slogan itself — Join the Resistance — implies a proposal to rebel without the benefit of a clear cause.
What cause does the Yellowtard-led Philippine Opposition of today champion? Your guess is as good as mine. What seems to be lost in the pointed heads of today’s Yellowtard leaders is that the euphemisms and platitudes they use as fodder for their slogans are the very concepts that lost them an entire nation back in 2016. What is truly baffling is how they continue to soldier on today on the back of their dud notions of how Philippine society ought to be. As the venerable Albert Einstein say,you can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that created it.
All the Opposition need to do is answer a simple question:
What way if not the Duterte Way?
The Yellowtards need to accept that reverting back to their way — down that yellow brick road of Cold War yore — is no longer an option. Attempts to re-brand it have failed. For the sake of the hoped-for emergence of a real Opposition that Filipinos actually need, the Yellowtards should bow out of Philippine politics and make way for fresh ideas. The use-by date of the current old guard of Yellowtards has passed a long time ago. Time for a new breed of Opposition thought leaders who apply thinking to solve the nation’s problems rather than mere prayer.
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