Tribeless

Pips,
I think this is worth posting in everyone’s blog. Kung hindi niyo pa idol sa de Quiros, read on para maging idol nyo na rin sya. I-email nyo rin sa mga friends nyo. patok talaga. Sa tingin ko, Conrado de Quiros would want this story posted all over para marindi na lang si Gloria at mapwersa na siyang basahin. Or, on second thought, para basahin ito ng mga nag-iisip para kay Gloria. Enjoy and enlighten! hehe
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There’s The Rub : I refuse, Part 2

First posted 02:31am (Mla time) Sept 26, 2005

By  Conrado      de Quiros
Inquirer News Service

Published on page A14 of the September 26, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

DEAR MADAM,

You
will notice that I do not say, “Madam President.” That is because I do
not consider you my president. As-to go by the surveys and the number
of decent Filipinos who are dying or getting sick from seeing you on
TV-do most citizens of this country.

I refuse to obey your order
for me to desist from gathering with other citizens in Makati and
elsewhere. If Jojo Binay were to defy your order and call for a rally
in his favorite city to call for your ouster, I will be there.

Notwithstanding
that I am hard pressed these days to meet deadlines, given the
never-ending meetings that the never-ending divisiveness you have
wrought upon this country compels me to attend.

Had your
predecessor, Joseph Estrada, ordered this in his time, I would have
refused to obey his order too. To his credit, he never did so,
notwithstanding that he made noises to that effect. He drew the line at
certain things, one of them being the rights of the citizens. To his
credit also,he was an elected president-he left Jose de Venecia,
who like you knows only how to manipulate things, biting his dust. If
he had ordered a crackdown on those who were trying to oust him, he
could at least have claimed to do so in the name of the people.

To
your discredit, you have more than made noises to that effect, you have
done it. To your bigger discredit, you are not even the president.

You
say “The commuters, the pedestrians, the students and the business
sectors have complained about the inconvenience and the disruption of
the businesses resulting in economic losses.” How can the commuters,
pedestrians, students, and businessmen complain about these rallies
when they are the ones who are swelling their ranks? You tend to
confuse yourself, your hangers-on in Malacañang, your Pagcor-enriched
friends in the Church, and your toadies in Congress, with them. But
then you’ve always been confused about a great many things, including
who is the president of this country.

But that is nothing. What
is astounding is that you should forget how you got to be in Malacañang
to begin with, which allowed you to stay on after last year by helloing
Garci. You did so because we defied Estrada and did what we had to do.
I’d like to emphasize the “we” because I never saw you there. It is a
testament to how saintly Pope John Paul II is that he has not
importuned his Creator to send a lightning bolt your way for using his
name to justify your paralysis. You got to Malacañang on our blood,
sweat, and tears, not on yours. The most you can do is appreciate
protest, the least you can do is not stifle it.

If we did not
inconvenience the commuters, the pedestrians, the students and the
businessmen then-though I never heard any complaints from them, they
were busy swelling the ranks of the rallies too-you would never have
slipped into the Palace by the River and been free to torment us. If
you listen close enough to the complaints emanating from the commuters,
pedestrians, students and businessmen, you will hear that they have
nothing to do with traffic, they have everything to do with the
humongous inconvenience of having you still around to disrupt not just
the economy, not just the normal processes of democracy, but the
natural flow of life itself.

I am glad that you decided to ban
rallies against you in Jojo Binay’s city-though I have yet to hear you
ban as well rallies for you in Lito Atienza’s and Sonny Belmonte’s
cities-shortly after the anniversary of martial law. It is a very good
reminder of it. Though as I said last week, Marcos was still the
president when he declared it, having a year more to go. You are
imposing a de facto martial law without ever having been voted to power.

You
say you’re “tired of chasing the bully around the schoolyard.” I say
you are just as confused about your metaphors as you are about your
mandate. The normal course is for the bully to chase the smaller kids
around the yard, not for the smaller kids to chase the bully around the
yard. The normal course, too, is for the other kids to want to stop
being bullied and fight back. Guess who’s who in this equation.

You
say we are abusing your policy of maximum tolerance. I say you are
fraying our nerves and taxing our patience more than anything in the
expanded VAT. You are not tolerating us, we are tolerating you. A
democracy, in case you have forgotten, is one where power resides in
the will of the people, not in the will of the president, and certainly
not in the whim of a putative one. A tyranny is one where the ruler
rules without the consent of the governed. That consent is gotten
through the vote, not through Garci.

You say the people fighting
you are not good for the country. That is your opinion. But this is not
a matter of who is good or bad for the country, this is a matter of who
the people want to rule them. If this were just a question of who is
good for the country, I’d pick Nicky Perlas or Ting Roxas over you
anytime. Unlike you, they have a sound vision of the future and the
integrity to realize it. But like you, they have not been voted into
power, and so can’t be president.

I demand to know what moral
authority you have to conscript my loyalty as a citizen. As I said a
couple of months ago, I refuse to give it. I refuse to be a good
citizen to a bad president. “Bad” in the sense of lame or fake-my
apologies to the lame and fake. I refuse to serve, I refuse to defend,
I refuse to pay my taxes. Feel free to consider me a destabilizer. I
was, I am, I will always be. If I weren’t so, you would never have
tasted the power you now use so wantonly.

Feel free to arrest me
as well. I can always admit that anxious as I was to protect my
country, I called up people who sounded like Jojo Binay. For this:

I… am…not…sorry.