THE LEGAL FRONT

The June 30 papers carried as news President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s (PBBM) agreement with the statement of Dr. Aries Arugay of UP that “he should get a grade of ‘incomplete’ for his first year in office.” If this were a Court case, I would respectfully partially dissent to point out flaws in the purported agreement. For one, the supposed agreement appears to be based simply on a quantitative reading of the new President’s accomplishments after one year in office.  The news item mentions, too, the President’s “historic return to Malacañang” when PBBM had never been there before as President, merely as the son of a sitting President. I would thus view PBBM’s response as a politician’s polite way of avoiding unnecessary argument when he qualifiedly said that there has been incompleteness as “there was still more to do as the delivery of his promises remains a ‘work in progress’.” Had a qualitative assessment been undertaken, I believe that a grade better than “incomplete” would have been due after considering people’s legitimate and reasonable expectations from a new President after a year in office.  These expectations would, in my view, be the totality of the challenges the new President faced when he assumed office, and the quality and timeliness of the responses he delivered or could have delivered, complete or incomplete, to the people.  All these should have been considered to fairly give PBBM a grade. I would have also rated him based on how, in his one year in office, he responded to the people’s trust; how he nurtured people’s hopes; and how he observed fairness – the essential trait that everyone should accord to his or her fellowmen. I would particularly appreciate that PBBM’s journey to the Presidency had not been an easy one as he appears to have travelled with a lot of political baggage, although some of these also worked to his advantage at the same time that they weighed him down.  In the first place, he is a Marcos and this name alone carries a lot of implications, good, bad and neutral. He is even a “junior” and thus carries the exact name of his late father who had been President before in a difficult period of our history; whose responses to the challenges he faced, met a lot of internal and external opposition; and whose Presidency – as a result – abruptly ended with a very harsh historical judgment that the media still keeps alive. With exactly the same name, it might not been difficult for some to visit upon PBBM, the son, the sins of the father. Whether the father’s fate was merited is now beyond us and is a question best left to the more impartial verdicts of history and of the people.  The overwhelming election victory of the son, however, should somehow open the minds of many to the reality that the people overwhelmingly returned the son and namesake of a deposed president to the same office that the latter had to unceremoniously leave. The historical meaning of this development may take a long time to surface or to discern, and we may have no choice but to simply watch and wait.  The people’s electoral response, however, may take a shorter time to analyze, and it is up to us now to begin examining this response for its implications – what did the people mean when they overwhelmingly voted PBBM as President? At this point, I am tempted to believe that our politics and the political environment may have evolved between 1986 and 2022, a span of 36 years, during the intervening presidencies. We may now have a new generation of voters who may have new outlooks, values, and expectations, most of them far from those prevailing in the Marcos, Sr. years, for one, because the world itself has changed. The world in the middle of the second half of the 20th century was a world that was only beginning to whirl in ferment, although it was still a gentle one as our handling of the EDSA revolution showed.  It was a world when one could speak of the male and the female as the genders to consider, without fear of being chastised; when the world was just slowly waking up to the various forms of discrimination harming the rights of man as an individual; and when our people were beginning to realize the meaning, potentials and possible consequences of the democracy that the Americans left us as legacy. In the economic front, it was a world beginning to awaken to the realities of globalization and its effects, among them, the easy-to-perceive reality that decisions in one part of the world, such as Saudi Arabia’s on the volume and price of their oil, can wreck havoc on the lives of lowly Filipinos living half-a-world away and even among the wealthier people of the West: when the wealthy West catches cold, Filipinos in the far-off far east catch pneumonia. Politically, the world at that time was only beginning to really feel the bitter effects of the ideological battle between democracy and communism, as well as the measures, fair or foul, the combatants would take, to propagate their ideologies. To a large extent, this battle awakened the larger world to the use of violence and terrorism as methods of choice to secure desired political objectives. This was the world to which the elder Marcos responded.  ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]))