The summer of our discontent

There is an intensifying insurgency. The planets are aligning and, at least timeline-wise, we may have been the first to start a popular uprising against unfeeling and alienated authorities, insensitive and callous bureaucrats and unresponsive and incompetent governments. 

When President Rodrigo R. Duterte swept the presidential elections despite a Palace-instigated and well-funded hate campaign against him woven by inept officials who’ve sat comfortably on their behinds in the last six years, the wave of support from a defiant constituency overpowered what hate was contrived.

Enough of failure, enough of bureaucratic bungling and, in our case, enough of buffoonery. People are taking back their sovereignty. The debunking is going global and the parallelisms are quickly running from Asia, among our islands, to the European continent, there among the British isles, and then possibly, in the next months, across the North American continent.

Recently, in Brexit (the British exit from the European Union), the United Kingdom had quickly filed for divorce and followed our presidential elections by thematically rebelling against the so-called ruling class, in their case, the Brussels bureaucrats. Just a step behind, perhaps the Americans might follow suit by rebelling against the D.C. establishment. Note the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump against political veterans long entrenched that their buttocks have molded the high-back light brown leather seats on Capitol Hill.

Now pitted against Hilary Clinton, the differences between the longing for drastic change and the sentiments for continuity are even more pronounced. Trump represents the latent insurgency against the traditional, while Clinton, the establishment. It is a stark and well-defined dichotomy in the same manner that President Duterte represented an insurgency against bureaucratic ineptitude right where Roxas, the loser, stood, and whose tired and crusted platform was nothing more than more of the same, however failed and hollow the latter’s governance model had been in the last six years.

More than failed and hollow governance, that model had also resulted in failed and hollow economics for most of its constituencies. For Manila, now London, and maybe Washington D.C., this failure is the common thread of our summer of discontent.

For proof, analyze our unemployment data. Look at the combined underemployment data, if one is still unconvinced. While there is a lag between GDP growth and the number of jobs created in an economy, the government had enough time inside the last six years to narrow the gap had it been competent, and more important, had it been responsive. Note the parallelisms among the Brits in relation to the EU single market that has been around for decades and the deeply entrenched Washington establishment that Trump seeks to topple.

If knee-jerk discontent is to be the impetus for such grand and society-altering acts as installing a president on the basis of colossal dissatisfaction against a previous administration, then caution is in order.

Discontented, we replaced a relatively stable Diosdado Macapagal and gambled with an incendiary firebrand. Severely victimized under 20 years of dictatorship, at Edsa, we then replaced tyranny with Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos and Joseph Estrada, with the latter two succeeding Aquino respectively sans deep and altering discontent. Discontent, however, returned with increasing vengeance when we replaced Estrada with Gloria Arroyo, and then again when we replaced Arroyo with Benigno Aquino III. The subsequent strife spawned by discontent and upheaval speaks for itself.

Referencing Shakespeare’s deformed and tyrannical Richard III when we deeply resent our social and economic status and disregarding all caution blindly pursue drastic and diametric change then, in the resulting upheaval, as before, we risk leaping from the pan and into the fire.

We are lucky that Duterte’s economics is well-thought out. But Britain may have just shot itself in the foot by disengaging from the EU and the Americans may be facing the most dangerous presidency they’ve had in history.