Change

Cong Corrales .

“Change is the only constant in life.” — Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

LAST week was a particularly tiring week, I must say. We were bombarded with a wide array of crap by this administration.

There was the vetoing of the legislation that would have ended labor contractualization for good. Remember that ending “endo” is one of his core campaign promises which subsequently delivered the President the votes that catapulted him to power.

It supposedly signed it as a priority bill, only to veto the bill when it came for it to sign it into law. It reasoned that it only wanted to maintain the status quo between the interests of employers and their workers — what a cop-out.

This decision left the bill’s principal author, Sen. Joel Villanueva, and Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri flabbergasted.

“Unfortunately, profit wins again with the veto of the SOT bill,” an ABS-CBN news report quoted Villanueva as saying.

For his part, in the same report, Zubiri said he could not make sense of the decision of the President to veto a bill which it declared as urgent.

“They came into 2016 with very high hopes that the practice would be prohibited. Now, we are back to square one,” Zubiri sighed.

I am one with Zubiri in telling the President and its Cabinet to get their s*** together.

In what appeared to many of us as an attempt to diffuse the situation, the President unilaterally ordered the termination of all of Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office’s gaming franchises and licenses across the country.

It announced the “midnight order” literally in the wee hours of Friday last week. It said the nationwide shutdown order is in light of the rampant alleged corruption in PCSO. So, what’s next? Is it going to shut down the Bureau of Customs and other departments that it had a “whiff” of corruption?

Of course, the administration had to do the shutdown in the most public way possible. Its police force, like the trained bomb-sniffing K9 unit, scrambled across the country physically shutting down Small Town Lottery outlets.

Less than 24 hours from when the President ordered through a video posted on Presidential Communications and Operations Office’s, get this, Facebook page, the National Police implemented the order on Saturday morning. This, without the order in print. They just showed the legitimate STL operators the video and padlocked their outlets.

It can always say that they don’t need the written order since we are already technologically advanced now. The video is enough.

However, if it is so tech-savvy, didn’t they know that they can just as easily shut down the entire operation by unplugging the national server in Manila for Lotto, Keno, and other PCSO-granted games?

Without tickets bearing the bettors’ number combinations on legitimate PCSO paper, would you still place a bet? The answer is a common sense, no.

They didn’t have to pose like bumbling idiots for the cameras showing they physically padlocked the outlets.

As if that act isn’t bad enough, in the same week 13 people were killed in five days in Negros Oriental. That is, at least, two killings per day. Let that sink in for a while.

In an Inquirer report on Sunday, the province’s police conveniently claimed that the assailants involved in the killings “identified themselves as members of the New People’s Army.”

Now, that is just pure hogwash. How did these Maoist partisans “identify” themselves? Did they leave their business cards at the scenes of the crime?

We are not in 1983 when the government can just blame the communist rebels without the other party issuing a timely response via the internet.

In a statement over the weekend, the Communist Party of the Philippines denied that their fighting units were involved in the killings.

The same Inquirer report stated that the militant groups have expected the spate of violence in their province as a prelude to the declaration of martial law in the Visayas and ultimately to silence political dissenters and government critics. What is more effective in silencing dissent that killing the dissenter, right? Wrong.

In a democratic society, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. To be silent in the midst of injustice is not patriotism. It is idolatry. It is blind obedience.

Even the newly installed chief of police of Valencia City in Bukidnon, Lt. Col. Surki Sereñas, agreed with me.

“Precisely! When I went to China and recently in Vietnam, I said if CPP becomes the ruling party in the Philippines, si Cong B. Corrales una mawad-an trabaho. Dili na pwede ang Cong Rant, hahaha,” Sereñas commented on my Facebook thread.

Since its campaign, this administration has been bandying the slogan of change. It was much like former US President Barrack Obama’s slogan — change and hope.

It sounded good. We were all hopeful that a no-nonsense change is going to happen in our benighted country. But the thing is, change is going to happen whether you promise it in a campaign sortie or not. Whether this will be a change for the good or the worse, is an entirely different matter.

Matter changes according to its inherent contradicting characteristics and how long these contradictions are contained. Although these opposing characteristics are united in a singular matter, the contradictions within and without the same singular matter will give the impetus for it to change into an entirely different matter.

In short, when you burn a paper it becomes ash — carbon. Pfft.