Randy David | PUBLIC LIVES On January 19, 2001, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Gen. Angelo T. Reyes went up the Edsa Shrine with the service commanders of the AFP to announce their withdrawal of support for their commander-in-chief, President Joseph “Erap” Estrada. That act tilted the balance against the incumbent president and precipitated his ouster from … Read more
I am very pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision on Presidential Proclamation 1017. On hearing the first cryptic reports on radio, I thought this was another one of those win-win verdicts that try to please everyone. It is not. The Court has struck a blow for liberty and democracy. As one of the lead petitioners … Read more
Not a few people from both the opposition and the administration were surprised by the launching of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Chacha Express. The resort to “people’s initiative” as the vehicle for Charter change effectively demobilizes Congress. It transfers political debate from the halls of Congress to the uncharted terrain of public forums and mass actions. This … Read more
Not too long ago, it was typical for Filipinos to work, start a family, and die in the same town where they were born. Today our people live and work in 192 countries in the world. They are exposed to a diversity of social systems and cultures. They are sources of new expectations. This global … Read more
For two hours last Sunday, I watched with great interest the National Geographic documentary on the lost Gospel of Judas. I have since read the English translation of this Coptic text. Unlike my brother, Fr. Ambo David, I am not a biblical scholar, and so I will turn to him for historical context when we … Read more
On Feb. 24, the day Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of national emergency, I experienced something that completely illumined my outlook of our country’s political crisis. I refer not to my arrest under Proclamation 1017, but to what I saw at Camp Karingal, where I was briefly detained. There I witnessed first-hand the hidden … Read more
One can be certain that almost every Filipino today desires change in the way the nation is run. What form that change should take is, however, the subject of much debate. Some believe that if only we can have better leaders, there may be no need to change the system. Others think the quality of … Read more
As we now have seen, Proclamation 1017 had two basic objectives: first, to create a climate of urgency to justify extreme police measures and, thus, a chilling effect on the public; and second, to test the public acceptability of the use of even more coercive measures in the future. The Arroyo regime’s readiness to use … Read more
In modern, stable democracies, politics is kept within institutional limits. It is not allowed to invade other spheres of society, or to occupy the greater part of a nation’s time. The public remains conscious that there are other equally important things in life worth pursuing. There is art, there is economics, there is science, there … Read more
Almost everyone will probably agree that our national life today is pervaded by a sense of exhaustion. This is best indicated by the weariness we exhale at seeing the faces of the same persons who have dominated the political stage in the last forty years. Instead of finding in them traces of the values we … Read more