OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT
Diwa C. Guinigundo
In 2019, Volkswagen said goodbye to the Beetle we all know, stopping the production of the iconic car of the last 80 years. It was Adolf Hitler who commissioned engineer Ferdinand Porsche to design a practical and cheap vehicle for the people, volk in German, and thus Volkswagen was born. Overtaking the record sale of Ford Model T in 1972 with over 15 million, Volkswagen had to let go of the Beetle because its sales finally dwindled to just around 15,000 from 43,000 six years earlier.
It must have been painful for Volkswagen to walk the last mile, and dispose the Bug. But to the press, the auto firm announced it was embracing the future by building new electric vehicles in Tennessee, USA. The plant will pivot toward zero emission vehicles of the future. The demand ahead is electric mobility for people. No one disputed the company’s belief that the Beetle was once upon a time a great equalizer for “society and culture at large.”
The last mile for the Beetle was no particular person’s goodbye or a company’s goodbye, Volkswagen said, it’s everyone’s goodbye. The future calls for a shift to more environment-friendly solution to people’s transport needs. Citizens expect to be assured their needs are met for they are part of the community.
It’s not difficult to see Volkswagen’s decision to drop the Beetle in favor of a modern prototype to be very akin to the Filipino people’s decision on May 9. The electoral contest has invariably simplified into a race between Vice-President Leni Robredo, a symbol of new demand for transparency and accountability in government, and former Senator Bongbong Marcos, no doubt a symbol of the past. Values choice can never be divorced from politics.
For as early as 1986, the Filipinos at EDSA had repudiated the 20-year legacy of President Marcos and his New Society that mutated into plunder, violence and debt-driven growth. One proof was when Marcos was flown to Hawaii, US customs officials confiscated the Marcoses’ countless bags of gold, cash, jewelries and certificates of bank deposits and other assets.
If the Filipinos choose to elect Marcos Jr, this would be parallel to what the Scripture admonished in Proverbs 26:11, “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”
Far-fetched?
In the next 36 years after EDSA, the Marcos family managed to wriggle into the Philippines, run for public office and even win. If this is Volkswagen, it would involve some engineers surreptitiously retrofitting the Beetle to keep it somewhat updated even as it still offered the same gas-fed, carbon-emitting solution.
The Germans would not have any of it.
To be sure, some have also made a travesty of our justice and democracy. Despite the rulings of the Supreme Court, they refuse to acknowledge much less admit their offense and restitute the Philippine Government. Family executors particularly Marcos Jr breached tax laws and refused to settle P203 billion in estate taxes.
Notwithstanding the ruling of the civil courts and acts of Congress that confirmed arrest and imprisonment and other forms of human rights violations during martial law, no member of the family expressed even an iota of remorse. The rub is that they simply deny these brutalities ever happened, and appeal to everyone to just forget the past for the sake of unity. For Cambridge Analytics had already rebranded the Marcos name.
Paid trolls have made it even easier to clear the road for a Marcos comeback. VP Leni, a UP economics and law graduate, was demonized as lugaw and lutang, conveniently sidestepping the ugly truth that their bet failed to even graduate from college. Marcos’ dictatorship was extolled to be benign, promoting prosperity and instilling discipline to freedom-loving Filipinos.
Now it is easy to understand why people who rely on brief Tiktok and YouTube uploads now believe the golden years of the Philippines were the gift of Marcos to the Filipinos, that tons of gold would be brought back to the Philippines and distributed to the people, that the Marcoses remain innocent as charged because they have remained scot-free.
Society has been conditioned to always answer “respeto lang” when asked why would anyone vote for Marcos Jr. “Respeto lang” is valid when deciding on individual style and color. When choices assume national importance like whose leadership should we entrust the business of economic recovery, it is everybody’s business. It cannot simply be an individual’s concern because Marcos Jr is a cut from his father. He stands for continuity that is opposed to a new brand of leadership, one that is anchored on good governance and competent economic stewardship, one that upholds the rule of law and prosecutes corruption in public service.
If we are to be united, there are a hundred reasons to establish it on relevance, on future-proofing our country against the resurgence of that past that we discarded 36 years ago. This is the unfinished business of People Power. It took Volkswagen six years to discontinue the Beetle. Perhaps for the Philippines, 36 years of patience should be long enough. No amount of rebranding will make Marcos Jr fit for the future.
May 9 is the last mile; it is when the future beckons.