BY ROMMEL YNION
WHAT should we do when we feel like we are in a gray area, vacillating over whether to take a stand or not, wracking our brains to squeeze moral principles to guide us through labyrinthine issues, and navigating through the eye of a political storm that threatens to pulverize our ship of state?
We can, perhaps, sip from the marrow of wisdom from a bygone era in which a seer, reeling from a socio-political malaise besetting his time and place, said it best: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”
Come to think of it, how many generations in world history faced a moral dilemma that tried their souls, pushing them to that noncommittal space between the devil and the deep blue sea? Yes, how many? After The Guilded Age, the human race lived through three cataclysms: The First World War, then The Great Depression, and yes, The Second World War.
And, no doubt, the very soul of humanity met its greatest test in the last war in which citizens of the world could not afford to somnambulate in a gray area and had to choose between good and evil – yes, between God and Satan.
After Adolf Hitler gobbled up Europe, leaving only England as the last remaining bastion of liberty, the world only faced a pendulum that swung between freedom and slavery.
A no-brainer, perhaps, to those who understood the dynamics of international power politics but obviously a brain twister to the uninitiated at that time. For at that juncture of history, the world teetered on the brink of a dilemma: either living a life of liberty or forever being chained to the delusions of a megalomaniac who only relished his demented idea of a Superior Race and the Final Solution to rid the earth of its obstacles.
The world that we know today is a product of the citizenry’s choice at that time in which, refusing to stay neutral in a moral crisis that has torn them between good and evil, they took a stand, pulverizing the totalitarian forces in the beaches of Normandy and into the crevices of oblivion.
We, Filipinos, now face today that same moral crisis that befalls every generation of the human race, in an evolutionary process that defines its ultimate destiny. How then we will fare in this cataclysmic test will determine how we will live for, at least, the next 100 years.
Our options are a handful, dichotomized only into either rule of law or the rule of one man. For how else can we define a situation in which, on one hand, P-Noy just wants to follow his interpretation of the law while, on the other hand, the Supreme Court had already deemed his Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) unconstitutional.
Simply put, the Chief Executive, mandated by the Constitution to implement the law, is now questioning the authority of the Supreme Court, the final arbiter of the law.
Does it take a genius to understand that if this continues to hang in the balance, our society will degenerate into a cesspool of anarchy and that if we fail to eschew neutrality and take a stand, the very backbone of our democratic being will burst asunder?
The State of the Nation Address that the President will deliver today will just end up as a footnote in our history someday but the context in which it had been written will forever define our nation’s character in the eyes of the world.
For in the final analysis, the international community will only respect us if we can show not how strong we are politically and economically but how firm we stand on our moral ground in the face of evil.
Today, as we hear P-Noy speak, let us remind ourselves that our government is a system of laws, not of creative thoughts of demented men obsessed only with satisfying their greed and that no amount of speechifying even from Malacañang can change that principle that has withstood the test of time./PN
