Dangerous calls for People Power

Editorial

AS in the past many years, attendance at the various activities of last Saturday’s 26th Edsa Anniversary was sparse. It was widely publicized that President Benigno Aquino 3rd was going to be the chief celebrant at the activities at the Rizal Park and the Edsa People Power Shrine.

No respectable fraction was seen of the original men, women, student and religious activists from civil society groups who responded in 1986 to the late Jaime Cardinal Sin’s call for the Filipino people of God to go to Edsa. He had asked them to defend Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile and the Marian-image-bearing Vice Chief of the Armed Forces Fidel Ramos from the tanks and combat-ready battalions of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos and AFP Chief Fabian Ver.

Without those nuns, seminarians, priests, and laity-activists, most of them people who prayed the rosary, Edsa Uno would not have happened.

Signaling the allergy of the government to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother Mary to millions of Filipinos, there were no activities involving President Aquino at the Mary Queen of Peace Shrine.

Many of those Edsa 1 veterans, who up to now value prayer and Mother Mary as much as they did when they risked their lives to respond to Cardinal Sin’s command, lament the expulsion of faith and spirituality from governance. The see that after the Edsa People Power Revolt, national and local government leaders have shown little true love for the poor. What was seen instead was these leaders’ devotion to their personal, family, business, dynastic and partisan interests.

This is why corruption, infidelity to the Constitution, disregard for the basic tenets of ethics have been hallmarks of Philippine governance.

President Aquino and his Cabinet have had almost two years to remove the corrupt Arroyo-regime people from the government. Aquino allies massively control the House of Representatives. But despite having jailed and charged former president Gloria Arroyo, and despite the President’s incessant reminders that the “Daang Matuwid,” the righteous path, is the road his administration treads, the government departments and offices are until now strangled by corrupt officials.

What happens if C. J. Corona is aquitted?

This must be—it can be the only rational explanation—for Mr. Aquino’s insistent declaration that Chief Justice Renato Corona must be convicted by the Impeachment Court—otherwise he, the President, would not succeed in vanquishing corruption.

These are his own words. He has said these a number of times on separate occasions.

The President has admitted that even if CJ Corona is convicted he would still not be able to win the war against Filipino poverty. But he insists on Mr. Corona’s removal as the Philippine state’s chief magistrate because as long as Corona is in office, the Aquino government’s plans and programs against graft and corruption will never succeed.

That extremely wild claim attributes to Mr. Corona the power of a Mafia don of dons. Yet President Aquino obviously believes it with all his heart and mind.

And that is why he has asked the youth and, on Edsa Day itself, the entire Filipino people to help him. He asked the masses to rise in a People Power action similar to Edsa 1 to kick Chief Justice Corona out.

It’s an extremely dangerous call. Some 70 percent, more than two-thirds, of our adult population love the President so much. They believe that he is doing a great job as president. They could hear his call for People Power as a call to storm the Supreme Court.

What if the masses who adore the President carried out his call, occupied the Supreme Court and dragged the demonized CJ Corona and the other justices by the hair and beat them to a pulp?

This is what Hitler’s mobs did to the Jews and Mao’s Red Guards did to the so-called capitalist roaders.

Would the President stop the police from doing their job of protecting Mr. Corona and the other Supremes?

Is this going to happen—if Mr. Corona is acquitted?