I am against Con-Ass. I oppose Charter Change. Not because I am an oppositionist, and not because I am a Government destabilizer.
The attempts by the Administration to change the Constitution are claimed to be principled and committed stands for change. Yet the push for a Constitutional Assembly, as it stands now, is consistent with the outright and deliberate demands and desires of This Government to perpetuate itself in power. It is consistent with the outright and deliberate attempts to silence dissent and opposition. It is the outright and deliberate desire to bastardize the document that stands for our country and our people.
I oppose Con-Ass and Charter Change for precisely those reasons. I oppose tyrrany, deception, and imprudence, reflected in every single antecedent that leads to tomorrow’s sales pitch for Cha-Cha. The lackeys and henchmen of This Government may say all they want about history absolving Gloria, but the fact remains that she is not absolved in the here and now. Any act of absolution is only possible with sin, and that the act of tampering with the Constitution for selfish ends and whims is a sin that cannot – in the present or in the future – be forgiven or absolved.
The abracadabra of This Government is that Charter Change will lead to reforms and good governance. The claim is that through Charter Change, the institutions that have become “barriers” to national development can be reformed, and certain amendments in the text of the Constitution can help improve the lives of the citizenry. It does not, it cannot, and it will not. The people will not wait for twisted legacies, or the judgment of a twisted sense of history, to things they are entitled to now, or for things that they have long been denied.
The people need food, now. The people need shelter, now. The people need employment and education, now. The people demand transparency and accountability in Government, now. If these are things that the Government cannot address, if these are things that the Government continues to set aside in favor of near-sighted foresight, then they have no business in their regime. A Government that glosses and obsesses itself with legacies and histories is one that fails. More than that, a Government that refuses to learn from the lessons of the past, denies the needs of the present, and is hallucinating over its future has no business being a Government.
They need to go. Not only because it is just, not only because it is proper or that it is fair, but because it is time. And Heaven forbid that I echo the words I wrote more than a month ago, it is not without a sense of shame that they must be repeated again and again until we have had enough, and that this seed of a dictatorship masquerading as a steward of our Republic has had enough.
I oppose Con-Ass. I oppose Charter Change. I am a citizen who has had enough, and I have had enough of the regime of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
