Quest for peace and the President
If the Chinese Zodiac is to be believed, 2017 as the Year of the Fire Rooster could bring both luck and misfortune for President Rodrigo Duterte, who was born on March 28, 1945 and which is a rooster year. There are no hard and fast rules in the zodiac in determining what the year holds for an individual, but it would also be good for the President to take heed of the warnings.
The Chinese Zodiac says that people born on the year of the Wood Rooster, are “energetic, overconfident, tender, and unstable,” characteristics that easily describe the President. But it’s not as if zodiac signs determine the probabilities in a presidency. It is still his sincerity and commitment to his earlier pronouncements and promises to the people that would determine whether his administration would succeed or fail in the coming days.
Topping the list of issues that are subjects of President Digong’s assurances during the campaign period was the peace process. People really banked on it, believing in his previous capacity to talk with revolutionary forces.
Perhaps, it is still too early to speculate based on recent turn of events, but one of the glaring realities that seem to cloud the talks is the slow pace of the release of political prisoners. Will they be freed or not? There are many conjectures going around now, certain things that self-proclaimed gurus of national issues think they know better.
People tend to expect new things to happen at the turn of another year. This has become so predictable that, like the plot in teleseryes, only the characters are changed so that one can guess where the story is headed. It becomes boring. (But TV networks continue to air such programs because first, they think the masa want them and second, advertisers pour their money into them.)
Together with these are the negativity and gore that TV news programs pass off as “information” and which do not help people understand the issues but only add to the hopelessness and disillusionment of citizens regarding the state of affairs in our country. And so we ask, just like in a song: “Where do we go from here?”
Anyway, the so-called prisoners of conscience and their families are waiting for the fulfillment of the President’s “promise” but that might never come. But why his seeming change of heart?
It must be clarified here, though, that political prisoners are not criminals. They only got incarcerated because the former administrations and their military minions considered them as “threats” to their effort to quell the insurgency. These people didn’t realize that the real solution to the problem of insurgency is by addressing the root causes of poverty and not going after personalities or ideologues, who in the first place are the ones who saw what these problems are.
Sad to say, President Digong is falling on the same trap that his predecessors have fallen into, believing that the only solution to the insurgency problem is silencing the complaints with the use of the gun. And we thought we have found an ally in the quest for peace in President Digong.