It’s never too late to learn something new. And here’s a list of new stuff I learned in the year just past:
I learned that it’s possible for people to accept martial law, like Filipinos in Mindanao and elsewhere did during the war to eliminate the terrorists who occupied Marawi City for half a year. And that it’s perfectly fine to praise our troops and to hit them up for selfies instead of looking at them with fear, loathing and suspicion.
I learned that it’s no longer kosher to dream up figures and to extrapolate them without question, as we’ve seen in the so-called body count in the ongoing war against illegal drugs. Thus, from a high of 17,000 killed last year, without so much as 100 actual, verifiable alleged victims of extrajudicial killings, it was all right to bring the figure back down to the 3,000 or so reported by the only official repository of such data, the Philippine National Police.
Speaking of which, I learned that human rights are the monopoly of one political faction in Philippine politics identified with the previous administration. Violations of human rights cannot be invoked when the victims cannot swear to be against the current government.
This is similar to a realization I made last year that good news on the economic front is meaningless if it takes place under President Rodrigo Duterte. Apparently, improvements in the economy can be bandied about only if that is the only thing that you can point to by way of achievement—even if most of the time government had absolutely nothing to do with their taking place.
I discovered that it is all right to not know anything, even if you are the head of state with a reputation for knowing nothing. And after you admit that you are clueless, misinformed or otherwise totally ignorant, this relieves you of the problem of taking responsibility for your actions.
I learned only last year that being in the political opposition clothes you with the blanket authority to criticize everything, even if it exempts you from proposing anything better. (Please refer to the positions on various issues taken by Edcel Lagman and Antonio Trillanes.)
I learned that there is really no reason to have a vice president if the president is fully capable of performing his job. Of course, occupying the post of vice president has always been a particularly useless endeavor—it’s just that the current occupant highlighted the inutility of the job in the past year.
I became convinced that it’s no longer possible to simply assume that because something was reported in the mainstream press, it’s necessarily true. That goes double for media outlets that cannot seem to decide if they should continue looking down on mainstream because they “own the Internet” and are the vanguard of “new media” or to identify as mainstream when they get criticized in social media.
Finally, I learned that the people who describe themselves as “decent” can dream up the most scandalous perfidy, like the Dengvaxia scandal.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t learn that last year, since I’ve been basically saying that for nearly a decade now.
What the dengue vaccine scandal only did was to remind me of the hypocrisy and greed of the Yellows. Who, I learned last year, are no longer Yellow but Black, White and totally red-faced in shame.
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I also learned that it’s possible for the Lower House of Congress to outperform the supposedly wiser, noisier and higher-profile Senate.
And that the people, through opinion surveys, are noticing that the bigger, traditionally less glamorous chamber is doing a better job at legislating.
The just-ended first regular session of the 17th Congress saw the Lower House pass a total of 428 bills and resolutions, including 30 bills that were signed into law. Among these are those providing free tuition in state universities and colleges and state-run technical-vocational institutions, expanding the coverage of free emergency health care services for indigent patients, free Internet access in public places and the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN).
Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez noted that House members filed a total of 8,528 bills since the 17th Congress opened in July 2016, broken down into 6,911 bills and 1,617 resolutions. Alvarez reported that the House processed a total of 2,100 measures from July 2016 to December 2017, or an average of 14 per day.
The various House committees managed to finish hearings on a multitude of issues, submitting a total of 552 committee reports. These include hearings on investigations conducted in aid of legislation, which seem to tie up the Senate no end, and on the impeachment cases filed against resigned Commission on Elections Chairman Andres Bautista and Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.
Alvarez pointed out that the people seem to be noticing and appreciating the industry of the House, as shown by the results of the latest Social Weather Stations survey covering the period of Dec. 8 to 16. The survey showed Alvarez’s net satisfaction rating improving from “neutral” to “moderate” at +14 (38 percent satisfied and 23 percent dissatisfied), up by six points from his rating of +8 in September.