In November last year, a simple, five-word-post reads: “Risa Hontiveros achieved nothing yesterday.” The Facebook post had generated more than 25 thousand reactions in one day, and several thousands more of shares. It also elicited more than a thousand comments, and thousands more in other social media walls, including X and Reddit. It was, unknowingly, a declaration of war. In times of crisis, they say, one does not only separate men from boys. The world also tells you who your real friends are and what type of person your enemies have become. They will allude many nasty and devious things on you, and even charge you for every random crime.
Many academics, most from the capital, including those from the country’s top schools and universities, priests and professor included, and as far as Cambridge University, laughed at the subsequent reactions to the post, an honest opinion nonetheless, reactions that are mostly demeaning re-postings. Several aspiring young writers, feasted on the brouhaha, making a lot of noise, while reacting to a truth that appeared undeniable – that Risa Hontiveros failed to accomplish anything out of her interrogation of the former President during a Senate Committee hearing. On that day, you expect to find a man who is supposed to be dead already, if not killed because of the bad publicity and gaslighting received from thousands of souls pretending to be a part of high culture!
For my critics, the good senator was supposed to deliver a final blow to the legacy of a man who brought out a new type of politics in the country after a lackadaisical type of leadership of a former President who lacked political will. Yet, they did not want to hear the truth because they want to compose all the melody that is Philippine democracy. They know it as a matter of fact, but they can’t face the truth because of a toxic sense of self-righteousness, all under the banner of the spirit of an elitist revolution that overthrew a dictator but failed to uplift the lives of the masses. Nevertheless, these snowflakes and trolls celebrated, as if they have taken down a man, without knowing firstly what seems basic in every democratic society – that all are born with the freedom to be express oneself.
They have summoned the heavens, imagined that they have put a noose into his neck, as if to suggest that it was political suicide and a career-ender, only to find out it touched no nerve and achieved nothing. The post hurt the ego and pride of the followers of the politics of moral uprightness that their heroine was supposed to represent. But what one critic focused on, whose name need not be mentioned because he is unknown, although he seems to believe that he is as erudite as Jacques Prevert, was the character assassination of a scholar, complete with an absurd picture in order to invite ridicule. In his mind, and his minions, and all else who haven’t achieved anything yet in their mortal lives, is that they have succeeded in taking down a man, forced him into existential resignation, sent into the void of a world solely defined by oblivion and insignificance.
Yet, like every monument of freedom, the same man still stands, to finally claim what the truth so often bequeaths to every bearer of its majesty – a human character that is defiant yet intact, a sanity that does not need to pretend, for if anything, those who insult the person who speaks the truth, cannot be intimidated by any effort or means that only serves to demean a man whose only mistake was to tell the truth. They will not stop, however, and they will cowardly think that they have won the battle, forgetting that the final judge and true arbiter when it comes to the destiny of men is neither history nor fate. It can only be God! The Absolute, the Prime Mover, the Alpha and Omega! In the Twilight of the Gods, there’s something that we mortals and all need to read – “Out of life’s school of war – What does not kill me only makes me stronger.”
