People of the Philippines versus Trapos' Initiatives

Now that the Philippine Senate has issued a strongly-worded manifesto against the deceitful socalled "People's Initiatives", at least the people have found an unlikely ally in the Upper House of the Philippine Congress. Let us take advantage of this situation where our oppressors are no longer united. The die is cast and the lines are drawn. Let us start the war for the people's support.

The people of the Philippines should include the civil society, the academe, the youth, the student movement, the professionals, the labor sector, the indigenous communities, the Church and their educational institutions, or universities run by friars and religious orders.

The people should be led by a credible personality who has no selfish agenda or skeleton in the closet. The leader should have the competence, the commitments, and the conscientiusness to lead the fight against the schemes, machinations, and importunings of trapos. He must have the credibility and the communication skills to articulate the sense of outrage of the people who are again to be taken in for a ride.

The trapos include the members of the Lower House, both those who actively participated in the surreptitious and devious planning, organizing, and scheming to advance such an insidious agenda, was well as those who, in their indifference, ineptitude, cowardice or absolute lack of concern, care and compassion for the people, have not stood up to the malicious schemes.

These devious machinations concocted by traditional politicians do indicate palpably that they just want to tinker with the fundamental law so as to remove the pro-people, pro-poor, and pro-Filipino provisions. They want to attract aliens including China to own, exploit, and bargain away our national patrimony.

The small guys like us, the voiceless, marginalized, and ignored citizenry should now wake up and join forces so that we can resist this new travesty of our human rights, another assault at our ancestral domains, and a blatant and shameless opening of our borders, our enterprises, our industries. These trapos want our land to be bought by China, our corporations to be monopolized by foreigners.

We shall then become aliens in our own native land. If China cannot invade us by war of aggression, its minions and dummies are going to allow the grabbing of our patrimony and place all our resources under the control and domination of alien powers.

And so, now that the senior trapos have sided with the people due their own unholy motivations, we should welcome this development and position ourselves to leverage the strength of this new unlikely ally. We know that the senators are only using us in their war of turfs against the House. But even if we know that these people have their own narrow objectives, we should have a tactical alliance with them for the moment, so that we can divide and conquer them in the end.

Let us start organizing our neighborhoods, our homeowners associations, our PTAs, our cooperatives, our labor unions, our student organizations, our faculty clubs, our prayer meeting groups, and our social networks and prepare for battle.

The prize is the hearts and minds of the people. Let us engage the trapos in peaceful, non-violent "bardagulans", debates, and public fora with our clubs, gangs, and barkadas. Let us show the congressmen and their subalterns, including governors, mayors and barangay leaders. Let us for once show these trapos that cannot fool all the people all the time.