Shaken, not stable
By
DESTABILIZATION or destab, it was a stab in d back, what the Vice President did in bringing the country’s problems to the UN. It doesn’t help that the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs for whom her meant-to-tell-all tape was intended has issued a disclaimer on the date the tape was received and aired. The harm has been done, thank you very much.
The VP’s backers would say it was a brave thing to do, keeping the tape so secret that all the more it acquired a sinister character so worthy of a John Le Carré novel. Imagine, the VP sitting primly two seats away from the President at a PMA event just days before the tape was played locally, and he none the wiser but greeting her like a chivalrous knight. As if on cue, the tape was followed by yet another politician’s filing of an impeachment complaint against Mr. Duterte in the House of Representatives.
The protagonists have disclaimed any link between the two of them. Not that it stopped the President’s allies from picking up the gauntlet and hitting back to destabilize the VP and the congressman. And so it goes. Who cares that taxpayers just want to make a living and bring home the bacon to their family, and if they can have a bit of peace and stability while doing so, is that too much to ask? Do they need to be shaken out of their ordinariness by the spectacular actions of politicians that they did not vote for, officials who cannot solve the most basic problems of their constituents but would impliedly denounce their own shortcomings to the world?
In the last US presidential election, said to be the meanest and nastiest ever, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, but for all the mutual brutality that marked the campaign, she licked her wounds in private, and on March 18 announced she was “ready to come out of the woods.” AP quoted her St. Patrick’s Day speech: “I do not believe that we can let political divides harden into personal divides. And we can’t just ignore, or turn a cold shoulder to someone because they disagree with us politically,” adding she would “draw strength” from the people “that will enable everybody to keep going.”
That’s what we need over here, the strength to keep going, because there are those who choose to put us down.