Those who keep saying, perhaps wishing, that the President is terribly ill must have been utterly disappointed at watching him before the joint session of Congress last Monday.
He came in at about a quarter past four in the afternoon. At about a quarter before four, my friend Mike Regino, the SSS trustee, reminded us that it’s probably going to be a loooong speech, so we might as well coax our bladders to reduce their contents. But the guards had already closed the doors for security reasons. So back to our seats we went, and then listened for the next two hours or more.
Yes, the President stood in that rostrum for more than two hours. MST’s Christine Herrera was right when she and the President had that little debate over the length of his Sona in a press conference he held way past eight in the evening.
I was seated in the same row as the leaders of the country’s chambers of commerce, senior citizens all, and they must have wondered how a man suspected by some to be “deathly sick” could hold his bladder and stand straight up while ranting in full bellow at the “enemies of the state” for more than two hours.
Right after his Sona, we rushed to the exit, aiming for the restrooms, and the leaders of the chambers of commerce had to plead with the security people to let us out. Security had to wait until the President had left the session hall, and courteously pleaded for understanding. An old lady complained that she needed to repair to the restroom to no avail.
And in the restroom, three hours after the President uttered his first words, almost everybody was saying, “how could the man be sick?” Indeed, how many septuagenarians could stand up and speak non-stop for more than two hours, drinking gulps of water along to wet his parched throat, without repairing to the bowl?
Then, when we were in the reception area, we found out that Duterte went straight to the rallyists outside the Batasan, another first for a President, to speak his heart out to those who protest most everything, and who have made a profession out of protesting.
“Does he never get tired?” my friend Norman Fulgencio, chairman of the board of the Philippine Postal Service Corp., wondered. Norman is about two decades younger than President Duterte.
Surveying the reception hall, and the parade of legislators and their ladies before the Sona, one could really see the difference from past political spectacles: The absence of pomp and pageantry that has made the couturiers of the land most unhappy. It was as if everyone tried to outdo each other in sartorial understatement. Which was all for the better.
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Finally the President, as already written in my pre-Sona column last Monday, is exasperated with the rabid Left.
You simply cannot please them. The Left in this country never seems to want to be right, and I mean right in its dictionary sense, and not the ideological definition.
I greeted a smiling DOLE Secretary Bebot Bello in the room of Majority Leader Rudy Farinas (who served us with chicken soup so good for the soul as it was for the taste buds), telling him “finally you can rest from your peace talks.”
He was going to react when Senator Chiz Escudero cut in and said, “with the President, you can never tell. What he says is not always how he will act,” all these in light Pilipino humor.
At the time, we were watching the press conference that the President segued into right after his not-so-pleasant head-on with the protesters outside the Batasan gates.
“Ano, may presscon pa?” we asked.
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One of the most heavily applauded parts of the kilometric Sona was the President’s demand for America to return the bells of Balangiga.
Years back, I was invited by my friend, then Eastern Samar congressman, Nonoy Libanan to grace the commemoration of the anniversary of the Balangiga incident which was a glorious part of our historic struggles against colonialism.
That incident was followed by the retribution of the American invaders who were ordered to kill every male above the age of 10 and turn Samar into a “howling wilderness.” President Duterte in his Sona, educated the nation about that sad chapter in our history.
Thereafter, the new colonialists took the bells of the Balangiga parish church as part of their war booty and brought two to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and another to their military base in South Korea.
Despite resolutions of the Philippine Congress and Samarenos for the bells to be returned to us, the Americans, both in the state and federal governments, turned a deaf ear to our pleas.
Now our President declared his resolve and his demand for the American government to return those bells to us. It is an important memento and symbol of our heritage that should be given back.
We await America’s response.